The Bishop of Our Possibilities

By LANCE MORROW

There is a moment in one of Vladimir Nabokov's novels when the narrator sees a mirror being unloaded from a van on a street in Berlin. Suddenly the mirror, by a tilt of grace, becomes "a parallelogram of sky."

A sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson's is sometimes like that: the mind held at an unexpected angle ... a sudden burst of lovely blue light. It is not a transcendental illumination, exactly. Transcendentalism was a short-lived American moonshine. Emerson's light is brighter. It glows with an eerily sweet intelligence and morning energy. Emerson's sentences make a moral flute music--prose as a form of awakening. They move in a dance of sensual abstractions, small miracles of rhetoric. He had no genius for massive literary architecture; he dealt in the lustrous fragments of his essays, in a succession of quiet flashes.

It is strange that this orphic saint who dined on clouds became a prophet of the culture's materialism. He was the nation's first international-class man of letters. He taught much of the 19th century how to write. He gave America a metaphysics: he sought to join the nation's intellect to its power. Emerson sanctified America's ambitions. Like the nation, he was, he said, "an endless seeker, with no past at my back." He was the wonder-rabbi of Concord, Mass., our bishop, the mystic of our possibilities.

The world's tribe of Emersonians has dwindled, but it is still a moderately robust and sometimes unlikely collection. Andre Gide enjoyed Emerson; discovering that is like learning (in the other direction) that the theologian Paul Tillich had a taste for pornography. Ex-Coach Woody Hayes of Ohio State University is a passionate Emersonian. That makes more sense. Part of Emerson--only a part--is a bright theology of pep, a half-time transcendentalism. "Emerson," says Hayes, "he's on my starting eleven"--meaning the authors Hayes most regularly rereads. "In fact, he's my No. 1."

Hayes was one of the speakers at Harvard's Sanders Theater last week, as Emersonians observed the 100th anniversary of Emerson's death. It has been an important year in the Emerson business. Last fall arrived Gay Wilson Allen's handsome biography, Waldo Emerson (Viking, $25). The Harvard University Press next month will issue a volume of extracts from Emerson's journals, chosen and edited by Harvard's Emerson scholar Joel Porte. The journals, a lifetime accumulation of notebooks containing much of the raw material from which Emerson fashioned his essays and other writings, are the most interesting of his works: brusque and shadowed and doubting and human in ways that the finished productions are not.

It is a shame that Emerson had to harden into a monument, into mere required reading, or worse, the man superseded by Kurt Vonnegut on the course lists. Too many generations came to regard him as a chill, gnomic bore, the best of American aphorists, no doubt, but also the most relentless ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," "Traveling is a fool's paradise," "... fired the shot heard round the world," and even the 1960s' dreamy license, "Do your thing"). His fatally worthy subjects (Self-Reliance, Prudence, Friendship) have oppressed generations of eighth-grade English classes. People should probably be forbidden the use of Emerson until their 30th birthday. He gets better as one gets older. Inside the marble, there is a wonderful writer struggling to escape the stone reverence with which he is usually imposed on adolescents.

Yet for a mild ex-Unitarian clairvoyant dead 100 years, Emerson is still capable of stirring surprising hostility. In a baccalaureate address to his senior class last year, Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti blamed Emerson for the ugliest tendency of the American character -- "a worship of power." Emerson, he said, "freed our politics and our politicians from any sense of restraint by extolling self-generated, unaffiliated power as the best foot to place in the small of the back of the man in front of you." This is Emerson as the imperialist Rotarian. It is Emerson as Uncle Sam in a Nietzsche suit.

Earlier readers had a deeper problem with Emerson. His voice seemed too rarefied, ethereal to the point of disconnection with reality -- and in any case demonstrably incomplete. He seemed almost bizarrely and willfully ignorant about the darker side of things. Henry James put his finger on it with an exquisite condescension: a "ripe unconsciousness of evil ... is one of the most beautiful signs by which we know him." The Candide of Concord.

Emerson was the rhapsodist of beginnings. In the disintegration of Puritanism, he cut loose from the granite Thou Shalt Nots of his forebears, seven generations of New England clergy. The 20th century has apocalyptic fantasies about the end of things. The trajectory of our thoughts tends to be downward. We are transfixed by Auschwitz and Hiroshima and Cambodia and Bangladesh and lesser barbarisms. The 20th century has rarely felt transcendental. What does Emerson's optimism have to say to such a civilization?

Emerson should not be understood too quickly. As William James explained, "Emerson could perceive the full squalor of the individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration." Emerson had wonderful lines about the fallen world: "It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs."

Perhaps the 20th century is merely one of the moping-dog phases. It may be the sin of pride to claim so much evil and despair for oneself. The Black Death killed off one-third of Western and Central Europe in the 14th century, but in the Emersonian calendar of the perfectible universe, it was only a temporary epidemic -- something that was going around.

Emerson sought to organize the individual soul, not an entire society. His works were essentially prayers for intelligence and character. He preached the holiness of the conscious mind. It is a vision of personal possibility, not a program for the state. Emerson must be held blameless for the fact that his exaltations on individual get-up-and-go have ended, in the fullness of time, by producing George Steinbrenner.

One can look for too much in Emerson; he claimed so much for himself: "Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation ... A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world." Emerson was also a bundle and knot of contradictions. He recoiled against the doctrinal chill and constriction of New England, yet he became a sermon and a prayer. His rhapsodies were lovely and extremist in the way of a Puritan metaphysician: "I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall." --By Lance Morrow

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