Emerson's Transparent Eyeball

Emerson's Transparent Eyeball

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 spaces, — 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 parcel of God.^[1]

Criticism on Nature

From Eric Wilson's Emerson's Sublime Science

CROSSING

[139] "Harold Bloom ambiguously hails the famous 'transparent eyeball' passage as the 'most notorious' in Emerson's work. FN Certainly this passage has drawn more attention than any other in Emerson's oeuvre, earning more frequent and disparate interpretations than any other. Whatever the passage might be, it clearly epitomizes Emerson's compressed, polysemantic style. It crowds together numerous tropes and allusions to the Bible, fully embodying the traits John Burroughs finds in Emerson's best writing: 'It is abrupt, freaky, unexpected... darts this way and that, and connects the far and the near in every line.... [I]t is a leaping thread of light.' FN