>>While RWE himself was a laugh a minute! This bit cracks me up every time!
>>
>>>Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a
>>>clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of
>>>special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.I am
>>>glad to the brink of fear.
>
>I think your receiver needs tuning, Doug. AFAIC, that passage is
>one of *the* most lyrical statements of the basic joy of being a
>human ever written. It's a quote that has often occurred to me at
>sublimely nothing moments like taking out the trash on a cold night.
>It makes me acutely aware of myself as a bundle of sensations,
>experiencing one particular moment of darkness, cold, wind,
>starlight -- whatever the feelings of that instant might be -- in
>the limitlessness of time. It makes me feel that even if life has
>no ultimate meaning, it's a privilege just to experience the
>transient awareness of an extraordinary universe. Which is a pretty
>good emotional return to get from the simple act of taking out the
>garbage -- that's thrifty New Englanders for you!
>
>I am also amazed by the guffaws that RWE's "transparent eyeball"
>elicits. I can't imagine a more compelling image for a healthy
>negation of the ego. Since RWE's message of "self-reliance" is
>often misinterpreted as being the forerunner of today's "greed is
>good," it is important to focus on the *loss* of self that RWE
>speaks of along with his feeling of being part of something greater:
>"... 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 particle of God."
>
>Write this off as Mellow Yellow (quite rightly) if you wish, Doug,
>but I think RWE's transparent eyeball could see the way to a
>socialistic future for the U.S.
I can't see that at all. It's one of those very characteristic American romantic moments where the sublimity is all about the disappearance of the rest of humanity and one is alone with The Universe. Is this really the joy of being human, or some fantasy of self-sufficiency and glorious isolation?
>The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental:
>to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a
>trifle and a disturbance.
This is exactly the nonsense that Melville has fun with in The Confidence-Man - the iciness and the solitude. This is one of the ur-texts of the American narcissism I was going to write my dissertation on - the mix of emptiness and grandiosity that makes up the Imperial Self.
Doug