This week on StoryWeb: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature.”

I am thrilled to announce the relaunch of “American Transcendentalism: An Online Travel Guide.” This extensive website was created by students at Shepherd College in 2002 and expanded by other students in 2006. Now, a decade later, I have resurrected this outstanding website. I hope you will visit and take time to look around. When you do, here’s what you’ll find:

·       a writer-by-writer immersion in American Transcendentalism, a movement launched by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay, “Nature,” and at its peak in the 1840s and 1850s

·       a guide to the many places associated with Transcendentalism: Boston, Concord, Salem, Fruitlands, Amherst, New York, and Maryland (if some of these places seem new to you as “Transcendentalist places,” explore the site to discover the connections!)

·       pages from student journals and sketchbooks and photographs from their cameras, all inspired by the work of Transcendentalists and their literary heirs

·       WebQuests – targeted online explorations of the Transcendentalists and the writers and thinkers who came after them

·       links to learn more

The website – created primarily by Shepherd students – is the outcome of courses I taught on American Transcendentalism. In 2002, Dr. Patricia Dwyer and I team-taught a course on American Transcendentalism and a companion travel practicum. (You’ll even find pages from Patricia’s journal – and pages from my journal, too!) The students used our trip to New England, New York, and Maryland as the basis for the website.

Then in 2006, I taught the course again, this time on my own (and I was joined by Dr. Alan Tinkler for the travel practicum). The 2006 students added their journal entries, sketches, watercolors, and photographs.

Over the course of the next month, I’ll highlight particular Transcendentalists and the stories they told. Next week, I’ll feature Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods. He’ll be followed by Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative.

The man who started it all was, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose 1836 essay, “Nature,” launched the movement. Emerson’s essays make for dense reading – and I, for one, gravitate to the storytellers like Thoreau and Whitman, Alcott and Douglass, who make Emerson’s sometimes esoteric philosophy come to life. However, an Emerson passage I really love comes from this landmark essay. Maybe I like it so well because there is a small element of storytelling to it:

Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

You can see one student’s view of the transparent eyeball on the website.  

You can read “Nature” online – or if you want a print copy, I recommend an edition that also includes Thoreau’s essay “Walking.” If you want to delve into more of Emerson’s writing, you’ll want to pick up The Portable Emerson, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer, the Curator of Collections at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods. (When we went to Walden in 2006, Jeff was the person who spoke with us about Thoreau and the ongoing significance of Walden Pond.) To delve into some pieces by Emerson and other Transcendentalists, see Joel Myerson’s book, Transcendentalism: A Reader.

To learn more about Ralph Waldo Emerson, visit the outstanding program on Emerson and Thoreau at C-SPAN’s American Writers series. You might also want to check out the PBS page on Emerson. An excellent biography is Robert D. Richardson’s book, Emerson: The Mind on Fire. (Richardson is the featured scholar on the C-SPAN program.)

Ready to explore Transcendentalism more fully? Visit “American Transcendentalism: An Online Travel Guide,” and stay tuned to StoryWeb for the next four weeks!

Visit www.thestoryweb.com/emerson to find links to our website and to the other resources I’ve mentioned.

Listen now as I read the “transparent eyeball” excerpt from Emerson’s essay “Nature” – the essay that launched the American Transcendentalist movement.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.