Episode 12: James Marcus on Emerson and Melville

“In this part of the essay, Emerson is talking about walking a lot, you know, sort of walking through nature, taking a stroll,” says James Marcus in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “He has this rather sublime experience, and he describes it in this way: ‘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 a part or particle of God.’ Now, I mean, that is lofty stuff, and it can edge over into silliness. In a way, if you picture it, it starts to be silly and that is why Christopher Cranch’s cartoon is hilarious, because a literalization of it is kind of ridiculous, in a way. Part of the thing I love about Emerson is that he wasn’t afraid to seem silly in his eagerness to render the experience. What he's talking about—if you get away from the actual image of an eyeball with a top hat on—is a kind of ecstatic merger with the universe, where the walls drop, the boundaries drop, the currents of the universe move through you. If you look at it that way, he’s talking about a classic ecstatic experience.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with writer and biographer James Marcus about his book Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s sense of self was, Marcus says, “kaleidoscopic,” and so is this episode, presenting not one Emerson but many: Emerson the public intellectual who cherished the privacy of his study, Emerson the lapsed minister who left the church but continued to preach on the lyceum circuit, Emerson the initially reluctant but eventually ardent abolitionist, Emerson the Swedenborgian mystic, Emerson the loner who deeply loved his friends Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau, Emerson the son estranged from his father, Emerson the father undone by grief for his dead son, and, finally, Emerson the volunteer firefighter. Marcus and Hohn also go searching for Emersonian influences in “The Mast-Head” chapter of Moby Dick. But they spend most of the conversation with the essayist from Concord, that artisan of indelible sentences, whom Melville once compared to a great philosophical whale who could dive “five miles or more,” sounding the depths.