A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
which flashes across his mind from within, more than the
lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses
without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work
of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts:
they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
— Emerson, “Self-Reliance”, 1841
America — the real, the messy, the absurd America — didn’t really begin in 1776. The real America is not a set of documents, or a people, or a big landmass. Even in decline, America is a maze of dizzying and lethal ideals. An untameable instinct to escape: to escape society, history, other people, ourselves. It’s a never-ending yearning for newness and a primal horror at repetition, which stretched across and conquered a continent, before it doubled back on itself and spilled out like a flood over the world. America is extraordinary; America is terrible. Like everywhere else, it drives its citizens nuts. But the whole world knows Americans are crazy in a uniquely grand, stupid way.
The degree to which I can even write those words has much more to do with the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson than with any Founding Father. In rhetoric, in spirit, the one writer who fixed all the most difficult American paradoxes, like guiding stars for centuries after, was Emerson.
Growing up in Middle America, going to public schools, I never had to read Emerson. My first encounter with him was a sparsely-attended state university survey, which I took to satisfy a requirement. In one semester we blitzed through the first “half” of American literature (from John Winthrop’s Puritan speeches to Uncle Tom’s Cabin) landing briefly on Emerson’s one or two most famous essays. I take this as more or less the normative experience: since then, I’ve met only a handful of Americans who’ve read much of Emerson’s work. My more personal encounters with his writings came later, and they came to me when I was alone. I think it tends to be like this. Emerson still doesn’t quite work in the classroom. Like Michel de Montaigne, like Dr Johnson, or Friedrich Nietzsche (who profoundly admired him), he remains resistant to all but the most single-minded, solitary reader, privately seeking out the man called “the Mind of America”.
But there are always intimations of the Emersonian. There are for each American, whether they know it or not. My father, a liberal Presbyterian minister, had something of the Emersonian in him before he retired. In his tempered and essentially universalist preaching, wherein the Bible was an imperfect human document and there was resolutely no Hell: the mind, the heart, Nature itself — everything was radiant and testified to God. And this God was, in the theologian Paul Tillich’s sense, the “ground of being”, a foundation of love and faith.
A calm, scholarly kind of Protestantism, in other words — hardly the charismatic or enthusiastic Evangelism I saw in other churches. Places where you’d find a very American Christ: a demigod Jesus, with whom the faithful spoke daily, whose powers were the sole arbiter of safety or success in a world largely governed by demons. But I recognise, now, that even these separable styles were intertwined at base, with the same sense of very personal religious revelation: what the critic Harold Bloom once called the American Religion. He meant a religious and political style in which morality came down to individual souls in direct communication with God, not community or society. European Protestantism had become something stranger on the American continent, something intimately wrapped up in the colonisation of the land, the search for a wilderness Eden, the sacrosanctity of individual rights inscribed in the laws. And who was it Bloom identified the American Religion with most? Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville…but, above all, Emerson.
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