Jonathan Edwards struggles mightily–and, perhaps, vainly–to express his sense of ecstatic transcendence. He says:
And as I was walking there, and looked up on the sky and clouds; there came into my mind, a sweet sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express. I seemed to see them both in a sweet conjunction: majesty and meekness joined together: it was a sweet and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness; a high, and great, and holy gentleness.
Trained as he was in the Puritan religious tradition, Edwards of course frames his experience in terms of religious exaltation, but language fails him. He falls back on repetition–he latches onto three words and strings them together in different combinations.
My mentor, Emerson, picks up on Edwards’s glory in a pasture scene and improves on it. Emerson’s description of his epiphanic moment has delighted and annoyed everyone who has read him since, and whether you are delighted or annoyed depends on your state of mind. He says:
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. Almost I fear to think how glad I am. … 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 eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
The crucial difference between the two men is their radically divergent sense of the holy. For Edwards, it is something to fear–he grovels before it. Emerson leaps at it and joins in. The holy is not restricted to God alone but is something in which we all can and must participate.
Emerson’s protegee, Thoreau, plays with this notion. His riff on Emersonian Transcendence has been parsed and analyzed less than the “transparent eyeball,” but his ecstatic eloquence even more dramatically attacks our linguistic limitations. While standing on the slopes of Mount Katadin (Ktaadn, to Thoreau), he says:
Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable Nature, or whatever else men call it… What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,–daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?
Although this is sometimes described as Thoreau’s “freak out,” I think that this is actually very carefully controlled prose–Thoreau, after all, was meticulous in his revisions as he translated his journals to final drafts. He does capture the wild rush of thoughts that cascade through our minds as we contemplate the eternal from that singular moment of epiphany.
Annie Dillard, walking in her Thoreauvian boots, stops her car at a gas station in “Nowhere, Virginia.” She sits, pets a beagle puppy’s taut belly, and opens up, thinks nothing. Her ecstasy comes across as more reserved, more quietly analytical, more retrospective. She says:
But on both occasions I though, with rising exultation, this is it, this is it; praise the lord; praise the land. Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow–you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
Now. Right now. I imagine that man standing there with his cup, the waterfall, pushing down, water looping up in crazy parabolas and splashing his shirt. The waterfall is too large, too fast to capture in any way; the small tin cup (enameled steel, as I see it) and our language are equally inadequate to the task of capturing the eternal, or grace, or God. Later, Dillard quotes from her vast reading, saying that a psychologist has found that the “psychological present” has a “maximum span [that] is estimated to lie between 2.3 and 12 seconds.” Dillard goes on to ask, “How did anyone measure that slide?” How indeed. As soon as we become aware of now, “now” lies in the irretrievable past. Our cup is knocked out of our hands.
When walking with Muttboy, I often envy him for his ability to live completely in the now. His attention is focused not on the papers waiting to be graded, or the lawn growing ever more shaggy by the second, or the upcoming bike race that will require me to do at least some training. No: he is thinking about how this pile of deer-kicked leaves smells right now. How strange and ironic, then, that so much of our deepest philosophical pinings and the goals of our most intense meditations exist in the quivering of a dog’s snout, and animal supposedly without reason or intellect.
Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.” Henry David Thoreau, “Ktaadn,” from The Maine Woods. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Which reminds me, how come Creek Running North isn’t on your blogroll?
Lovely post. I love the image of the waterfall and the cup. So true! I often wish that I could just be in the moment when I am trying to fall asleep and the day is replaying adn the next day is already intruding.
Somehow I missed Creek Running North in my bloghopping, but you’re right–I need it listed.