Essay: The Bishop of Our Possibilities

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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. André 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.