...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...things, and so they appear not transparent but opake" (CW, 1 :43). 12 Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans....

...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...

...man is not as he ought to be; but our way of painting this is on Time, and we say Was" (J, 5: 371). "The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye," he tells us toward the end of Nature. "The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things,...

...evening knowledge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio. The problem of restoring to the world original and...eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul.1^ ... So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry...

...follows the transition in Emerson's "Nature" from the early "transparent eyeball" to the idea that the "ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye."12 But Whitman does not end his poem where Emerson and Wordsworth left their ruminations. In spite...

...Nature the division between body and soul that Whitman, in this passage, claims to heal: "The ruin or blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our...things, and so they appear not transparent but opake" (E and L 47). According to Emerson, it is only during rare and privileged moments of vision, and only...

...Nature, where "the redemption of the soul" supplies the correct point of view. Without such redemption, "the axis of vision is not coincident with the axis...things, and so they appear not transparent but opake" (CW 1:43). Like Kant, Emerson insists that freedom, the sine qua non of morality, is "known" through...

...possible explanation for this shift in Emerson's thought lies in the conclusion to the essay at large: The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at...of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited...