Chapter 15 - Two for One

Summary

I want to respond generally to these wonderful contributions by citing a passage from Emerson's “Experience.” This is a passage that I loathe as much as I love. It thereby expresses for me the radical ambivalence possessing me concerning the idea of America as it has traditionally been expressed. Just as Dante possessed T. S. Eliot's idea of art's visionary moment by a unique sublimity, so, too, Emerson's vision of America as a compensatory dream-vision always emerging is for me the manifest destiny, the femme fatale of the revisionary madness haunting and destroying any hope for America's future. Here is the infamous (for me) Emersonian passage:

When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water, or go to the fire, being cold: no! but I am at first apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals, and showed the approaching traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze, and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement, before the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.