...Stevens, walking the beach, might as soon say, "And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye!" or even "The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature is in our own eye." Closer still to his "turns blankly" and "solid of white" is the meditation of Emerson near the end...

...we happen to be in.56 The responsibility is ours, and the solution is an act or attitude of our own. ("The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature," Emerson observed, "is in our own eye.")57 But our adjustment is not just our own. It is in some sense...

...only "colossally." "The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty," Emerson says, "is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin...of things, and so they appear not transparent but opake. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited...

...to reader, or from time to time even by the same reader, Emerson recognized, "The ruin or the blank we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye....transparent but opaque. The reason why the world lacks unity is .... because man is disunited with himself" (W 1:73-74). In this idea is combined the understanding...

...learned desires, this self must stand aside — which makes sense when you remember what the problem was. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. So if not the self, who do we rely on? Like any poet, Emerson suggests his answer in a writerly way,...

...more radical than that taken in "Nature," for whereas in the Wordsworthian "Nature," he asserts that "the problem of restoring to the world original and...eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul,"100 here he is suggesting that ultimately both Nature and self are illusory. It is curious that...

...174); and P], 1 : 198, from which this ("Winter Walk") passage derives. See also Emerson in Nature: "The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at...of things, and so they appear not transparent but opake" (CW, 1 :43). 12 Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," in Poetry, Language, Thought,...

...passage of the "Nature" of chapter i; the structure of the book, like Finnegans Wake, is circular.8 "The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye" (73). This sentence diagnoses what we suffer when we fail to let our eyeballs become transparent. "The...

...revolutions, the miracles of enthusiasm, the wisdom of children. . . . The problem of restoring to the -uorld original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul." The above is an utterance as true and deep as it is beautiful and poetic. And here in this ancient and...

...themselves. The emptiness seen in night skies is finally a mere reflection of an inward blankness: "The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye," writes Emerson in Nature, going further in "SelfReliance" (1839): "A man should learn to detect and...