Danielle Follett

Henry David

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau Bonheur Surprise

"Blue Berries Always Surprise Us": Thoreau, Happiness and Accident

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This article explores the relations between happiness, surprise and accident in

Happiness

"A man asked me the other night," wrote Thoreau in his journal in 1857, whether such and such persons were not as happy as anybody, being conscious, as I perceived, of much unhappiness himself and not aspiring to much more than an animal content. "Why!" said I, speaking to his condition, "the stones are happy, Concord River is happy, and I am happy too. When I took up a fragment of a walnutshell this morning, I saw by its very grain and composition, its form and color, etc., that it was made for happiness. The most brutish and inanimate objects that are made suggest an everlasting and thorough satisfaction; they are the homes of content. Wood, earth, mould, etc., exist for joy. Do you think that Concord River would have continued to flow these millions of years by Clamshell Hill and round Hunt's Island, if it had not been happy-if it had been miserable in its channel, tired of existence, and cursing its maker and the hour that it sprang?" (J 9:206-7) In this remarkable statement Thoreau passes beyond the common affirmation that nature's beauty brings us happiness, to assert that nature itself experiences joy. Thoreau would likely have found it anthropocentric if we were to label this a personification or a pathetic fallacy.

Thoreau's subtle humor is clearly present in this passage, though that should not be seen to undermine its sincerity. 1 Although he does not record the reaction of his interlocutor, the journal entry continues by remarking on the "merry little tree sparrows […] [which] look very chipper […]" (J 9:207). This is not an isolated expression. Indeed, Thoreau regularly states that he witnesses the universal happiness of natural entities. In 1841, in one of his earliest entries, he writes: "In the woods there is an inexpressible happiness-Their mirth is jusst [sic] repressed" (PJ 1:343). Walden pond "is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker" (W 193). And in 1859: "the first and least audible sounds of awakened nature in the spring […] [are] in part an expression of happiness, an ode that is sung and whose burden fills the air. It reminds me of the increased genialness of nature" (J 12:147-8). In exploring what Thoreau might mean by saying that joy is inherent in nature itself, our path will, perhaps unexpectedly, take us by way of his philosophy of surprise, and his thoughts on accident.

The pursuit of happiness is one of the main reasons that Thoreau is drawn to the woods. After several days surveying and drawing a plan, he writes in 1857, "I wish again to participate in the serenity of nature, to share the happiness of the river and the woods" (J 9:205). Nature is healing; time and again Thoreau evokes its restorative and salutory qualities, and contact with nature is a form of medicine. "This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort, or boneset, to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek" (J 9:209). The healing powers of contact with nature are a romantic commonplace, but Thoreau theorized and practiced this contact with an intensity which surpassed his contemporaries, and which perhaps matched his own personal need to heal from deep wounds. In 1842, Thoreau lost his beloved brother John, and in 1843, his close college friend, Charles Stearns Wheeler, with whom he had lived and travelled. He was deeply affected by the shipwreck in which Margaret Fuller Ossoli died in 1850, whose aftermath he witnessed directly, as well as by the ongoing strains in his friendship with Emerson. Branka Arsić has argued that his final twenty years of life were afflicted with grief, giving rise to a "theory of perpetual mourning" (35). Sadness and mourning were very familiar to Thoreau and informed his thought even when not explicitly mentioned. As Edward F. Mooney writes, "tragic undercurrents, figured both as primal sufferings and as literary coping with sufferings, course through Thoreau's writing" (159). 2In light of this sorrow, let us turn back to our opening passage. Thoreau states that he is "speaking to the man's condition," his sadness, witnessed by one who sympathizes. Given the backdrop of melancholy in both the man's and his own life, Thoreau's emphatic words about happiness may be somewhat reminiscent of Keats' sixfold repetition of "happy" in five lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn," an overemphasis on joy betraying a hint of its opposite: Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! Keats' poem is haunted by melancholy; the excessive repetition leads the reader to suspect that while the urn and its depictions are eternally happy, the absent speaker does not share their joy. Thoreau's passage also hints subtly to a knowledge of sorrow underlying its repeated, even hyperbolic affirmations of natural gladness. However, Thoreau asserts directly that he, like nature, is also happy; unlike the distant speaker of Keats' poem, he makes everyday contact with the revitalizing source of joy. Sorrow and happiness are not incompatible but may be experienced alternatingly or simultaneously; and despite undeniable grief, Thoreau states that joy is primordial. Thoreau's stoic exercizes involving daily contact with the joy of nature constitute a healing regime.

Happiness and Surprise

The vitality of the wilderness is a source not only of healing but of surprise. The joy of nature for Thoreau stems often from the novelties he finds there, even amid the woods he knows well. Above all, in his journal Thoreau registers variation, or regularity with change, and he is in perpetual wonderment at the fact of novelty in nature. His journal records many moments where happiness is associated with surprise. "No man ever makes a discoveryever an observation of the least importance-but he is advertised of the fact by a joy that surprises him" (PJ 5:291). Indeed, surprise is one of the most important terms of the journal, especially after 1850, as he writes very often that he was surprised to see or hear a phenomenon. 3 We might speak of surprise as a dominant mood in the journal, in the sense used by Russell B. Goodman (after Stanley Cavell) in his discussion of Emerson's moods, and particularly that of surprise (45-51). Thoreau writes, "It is an agreeable surprise to find in the midst of a swamp so large and edible a fruit as an apple" (PJ 5:351); "The soapwort gentian cheers & surprises with solid bulbs of blue from the shade" (PJ 5:348). Surprise is sparked by a rare discovery or infrequent event; for example, after digging around in a muskrat's nest, Thoreau writes that he was "incredulous" to find crystals in it: "I was surprised to see at this hour of a pleasant day what I took to be beautiful frost crystals of a rare form […]. On examining them more closely-feeling & tasting them I found that it was not frost-but a clear crystalline dew in almost invisible drops […]" (PJ 6:50). But significantly, not only rare events surprise Thoreau. "I hear the universal cock-crowing with surprise and pleasure as if I never heard it before" (PJ 5:106). "Dandelions-how surprising this bright yellow disk-Why study other hieroglyphics?" (PJ 6:88). The simplicity and intensity of his reaction show that the self-contained meaning of the dandelion hieroglyphic has been registered and enjoyed, if not deciphered. Thoreau has attuned himself so finely to the phenomena of nature that the most everyday objects and events are a source of astonishment and delight, recovering the wonder of a child. Concerning the common leek, he exclaims: "What a surprising and stately plant! (J 13:413). A month after remarking on his astonishment at dandelions, Thoreau writes, "Blue berries [sic] always surprise us" (PJ 6:237). This sentence is somewhat bewildering, seemingly extravagant, as it combines two theoretically incompatible ideas, regularity and surprise. And yet this link may be precisely part of Thoreau's intention: to allow every ordinary sensation to be accorded the value of the new, even when of the same or a similar object. Thoreau is astonished as he perceives the novelty in the infinite complexity of familiar phenomena such as blueberries as well as in their minute differences from all similar ones, or perhaps as he can never predict their flavor or ripeness. Thus through sensitive perception is the old reinvigorated, habits are dissolved and the familiar recovers its wildness. In a late journal entry, Thoreau explains: "The old naturalists were so sensitive and sympathetic to nature that they could be surprised by the ordinary events of life" (J 13:180). Thoreau elevates the experience of surprise into a principle that guides him, not through the wild but to it, including toward the wildness and newness of an everyday dandelion or blueberry.

Thoreau's philosophy of perpetual surprise does not mean that he continuously forgets or sidelines the familiar, or that he approaches nature with the experience and senses of a newborn. In noticing subtle difference and novelty we perceive both regularity and variation, both the known and the unknown. He says that the old naturalists were sympathetic to nature, which implies familiarity. The surprise we may feel when perceiving subtle variations in a phenomenon is predicated upon a past encounter with it as well as the memory of that encounter, and this intimacy leads to sympathy. Presumably without sympathy all would be foreign to the perceiver, and the result would be simple incomprehension rather than surprise. This may be one reason that Thoreau did not especially seek "new worlds" outside of the Concord area: not only was it unnecessary to go far to find the wild, but the sensitivity to minute variation that he most appreciated could only be built up over years of experience in tasting one place, in sympathizing regularly with his natural neighbors. 4 In "Walking," Thoreau states similarly that "The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before […]" (Excursions 215). Thoreau here would mean the divine intelligence immanent in nature. This is not a form of negative theology or an approach to higher intelligence through ignorance. Rather, the experience of surprise presupposes a knowledge that is surpassed. "But taste the world. & digest it," Thoreau wrote in 1851 (PJ 4:158). Digesting would mean assimilating and remembering past experiences, which are not forgotten but superceded when we are surprised. Surprise is central to Thoreau's philosophy of conscious tasting, recognizing novelty against the background of familiarity, renewing the link between knowledge and tasting inherent in the Latin sapere.

Surprise is thus one of Thoreau's higher principles, guiding him toward the vital, the new and the wild. However, it is difficult to seek surprise in itself. One cannot expect the unexpected, nor plan to find the unforeseen. Just as Thoreau explores the meeting places of the regular and the novel in nature, likewise his methods of walking, perceiving and writing attempt to strike a balance between deliberation and accident. Despite his emphasis on surprise, Thoreau is quite clear that his habits of daily walking and writing are a form of disciplined and deliberate activity. He also states that perception itself must be intentional and oriented; otherwise it will miss those experiences that are most delightful and surprising.

Comparing the naturalist to a hunter, he writes in 1856, "How much more game he will see who carries a gun, i.e. who goes to see it! Though you roam the woods all your days, you never will see by chance what he sees who goes on purpose to see it" (J 8:192). Purposeful seeing is an element of purposeful living. Thoreau further develops the analogy with the hunter in a later entry, describing the "bright-red tops or crescents of the scarlet oaks":

Complete trees standing exposed on the edges of the forest where you have never suspected them […]. All this you will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,-if you look for it. […] There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,-not a grain more. […] Why, it takes a sharpshooter to bring down even such trivial game as snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what he is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance if he fired at random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so it is with him that shoots at beauty. (J 11:284-5, 286) This emphasis on intentionality would seem to enter into tension with the importance of surprise as the highest form of knowledge; it appears contradictory to say that one will see something unexpected only if one looks for it. With this apparent paradox, Thoreau seems to be attempting to theorize a delicate balance between deliberation and non-intentionality.

Willful action is a necessary prerequisite for the conditions of possibility of surprise. He elaborates this view in 1856, where he recounts the story of going into a swamp in search of a particular kind of cranberry which he had heard of but never tasted. Not only did he gather the new cranberries, but also he discovered a hairy variety of wild huckleberry, "a new kind to [him]" (J 9:41), that gave him "a shock, a thrill, an agreeable surprise" (J 9:42-43). As he writes up his notes about the joy he felt upon finding "that wild hairy huckleberry, inedible as it was" (J 9:43), he reflects on the idea that the deliberate decision to go on the excursion was an essential first step to encountering the unexpected:

If you would really take a position outside the street and daily life of men, you must have deliberately planned your course […]. I have always reaped unexpected and incalculable advantages from carrying out at last, however tardily, any little enterprise which my genius suggested to me long ago as a thing to be done […]. Both a conscious and an unconscious life are good. Neither is good exclusively, for both have the same source. (J 9:36, 37) Only deliberate action will put us in a position to see unexpected phenomena; as Thoreau says, we need both a conscious and an unconscious life. Seeking surprise directly would be impossible, but one may actively foster the conditions for the possibility of astonishment.

Random, inadvertent wandering, or worse, the simple, unconscious repetition of habit, will very seldom yield the hairy fruit of surprise. Thoreau is very much a philosopher of willful, conscious action; it suffices to remember one of his most famous lines from Walden: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately […]" (W 90). Purposeful walking allows him to witness and register the unexpected, infinite variations of his neighborhood. Thoreau thus seeks a balance between discipline and openness, conscious and unconscious activity, purpose and surprise.

Surprise and Accident

This balance forms the context in which we should understand Thoreau's philosophy of surprise, as well as the role of accident and chance in his writings. He sometimes describes his surprise discoveries as having happened by accident-that is, unintentionally-and he frequently says that he "chanced to" see or hear a certain phenomenon. In 1850, as he was beginning his new habit of daily walking and writing, he noted: "There is a place whither I should walk today though oftenest I fail to find when by accident I ramble into it, great is my delight" (PJ 3:142) The accidentality of the discovery enhances the happiness it procures.

In 1858, he discovers a very tall aspen that he had never seen before: "It is perhaps the largest of its species that I know. It was by merest accident that I stumbled on it […]" (J 11:268).

Interestingly, Thoreau transfers the accidentality of his experience of discovery into his conception of the writing process, foregrounding the experience of disjunction associated with surprise findings. He evokes this explicitly even in one of his earliest journal entries: "[My Journal] is always a chance scrawl and commemorates some accident-as great as earthquake or eclipse" (PJ 1: 259). Thoreau here puns on the word accident, meaning both an unintentional action and a catastrophe. The content of the journal, a "chance scrawl," is unforeseen in advance, like the surprise encounters of the field. In a later entry he writes: Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame-in which more may be developed-& exhibited. […] Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition-they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor & to think. The order of the thoughts in the journal was not chosen deliberately but was guided only by temporal sequence, as opposed to a constructed essay on a single topic. This reflects Thoreau's decision around this time to consider the journal a work in itself, and not a simple warehouse for thoughts to be used in later publications; the journal becomes a deliberate work that incorporates an element of unintentionality or accident. Critics have remarked on Thoreau's welcoming of the accidental aspects of writing, which makes him a forerunner of certain post-war theorists of the aesthetics of chance. Sharon Cameron writes, "Thoreau strives toward a randomness of impressions" (50); François Specq comments that the poetics of the journal "accepts contingency rather than aspires to formal necessity" (224); and Laura Dassow Walls states that Thoreau "wove [chance] into the fabric of his life and journal" (224). Thoreau's embrace of an element of inadvertence in the journal seems to reflect his process of discovery and his enjoyment of surprise in the field. He states that thoughts arranged this way "are now allied to life" (PJ 4:296). He writes: "There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours. […] We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success" (J 12:39). In a late passage Thoreau develops these ideas further; here Thoreau brings together surprise and pleasure as well as sympathy with the higher intelligence: I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made,-not forethought,-so that I occasionally awake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I had never consciously considered before, and as surprising and novel and agreeable to me as anything can be. As if we only thought by sympathy with the universal mind, which thought while we were asleep. (J 13:238) Again, sympathy with universal intelligence yields surprise. The importance of inadvertence and "ready-made" production for Thoreau may be seen in his statement: "I think that the one word which will explain the Shakspeare miracle-is unconsciousness" (PJ 4:294).

In these passages, accidentality, like surprise, is a subjective phenomenon; it is linked to unintentional action in the writing process. In the rare passages in which the terms chance and accident are related to natural and not human activity, Thoreau seems to indicate the idea of subjectively unpredictable or unknown causes, rather than the positive principle of ontological chance, causelessness or absolute unpredictability. When using a noun, Thoreau appears to prefer the term accident to chance. The former is most often used in its common sense to mean an event with catastrophic consequences and with identifiable though unforeseeable causes, though it is sometimes used with more neutral events. He writes in "The Dispersion of Seeds" that oak groves have arisen due to an unexpected cause, animals which hide acorns for future food: "Thus, one would say that our oak forests, vast and indispensable as they are, were produced by a kind of accident, that is, by the failure of animals to reap the fruit of their labors" (Faith 130). In another example, he speaks of the origin of "wild apple pastures-where the trees stand without order having many if not most of them sprung up by accident or from pomace sown at random […]" (PJ 6:192). Here Thoreau may mean that the origin of the wild apple orchard is accidental in opposition to deliberately planted ones, as he does not tend to say that wild huckleberries, for example, grow at random. As for chance, Thoreau uses the term mainly as a verb and an adjective, again in conjunction with events having unknown or unpredictable causes, such as the placement of trees "where the wind chanced to let the seed lie at last" (J 13:114). Used as an adjective, chance seems to mean rare or unexpected: "I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird […]" (W 302). The birdsong cannot be said to arise by chance, but in the early spring it is rare and unpredictable. On an old stone wall in disuse, Thoreau writes that he is "surprised to see slight stones still lying one upon another as the builder placed them while this huge oak has grown up from a chance acorn on the soil" (PJ 3:136). And on the discovery of an impressive appletree unknown to its owner, he exclaims, "Who knows but this chance wild fruit may be equal to those kinds which the Romans and the English have so prized […]" (J 10:136). In these last two examples, the presence of the oak and appletree are unexpected in the context of some human situation: the oak has arisen from the ruins of a wall, and the wild fruit is unappreciated even by the owner of the land. It would seem that the presence of chance in these examples might be explained by the disjunction between the phenomenon and its human context, which enhances its surprising quality. There seems to be no evidence that Thoreau's use of the concepts of chance and accident reveals a principle of objective indeterminism or ontological chance, but these ideas appear rather to participate in his philosophy of subjective surprise, or human, experiential unpredictability. 5 Thoreau's philosophy of surprise as well as his conception of chance and accident should be understood in the context of his subjective, relational or embodied epistemology analyzed recently by various critics. 6 Surprise is a key element of this relational way of knowing, as it emphasizes both the mode of perception with its embodied reaction of happy astonishment, and the undeniable particularity of the nonhuman entity encountered. We might thus speak not only of a mood but an epistemology of surprise.

Understood as "a novel and grand surprise," higher knowledge is grounded in the experience of perception and engagement with the world's dynamism. Thoreau's conception of chance appears to be based in his epistemology of surprise rather than constituting a philosophy of ontological indeterminacy. Unpredictability is a phenomenological experience and not an objective attibute; an event is unpredictable to the situated subject and not absolutely. Indeed, Thoreau clearly states that nature is governed by laws, which would include that of causality.

"Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed," he writes in Walden (W 134).

And, "Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation" (W 290). For Thoreau, confusion or irregularity in nature, or that which today we would likely call indeterminacy or chance, does not objectively exist but is a subjective impression due to our lack of understanding of natural laws. As David Robinson writes, "Thoreau consistently tries to see a particular fact or event not as a random or unique occurrence but as indicative of a more comprehensive idea or law" (109). Just as he seeks a balance between conscious and unconscious human activity, he sees that in nature both natural law and novel particularity play an equal role.

Accident and Happiness

However, although he understands that nature's processes are governed by natural law, Thoreau especially enjoys particularity, novelty and variation. He clearly aspires to heighten the experience of surprise and the revelation of the insufficiency of all previous knowledge, provoked by such unexpected discoveries. "Let me not be in haste to detect the universal law, let me see more clearly a particular instance" (PJ 4:223). He desires to reside on the outer edge of knowledge; he especially savors lingering in the borderland between knowledge and novelty, where surprising phenomena happen to be found. This brings us back to happiness. He would have been pleased to note the etymological link between happiness and happenstance, or things that happen to occur. The archaic word hap meant 6 See especially Peck 66-78 ("relational seeing" 66), Walls ("relational knowing," "epistemology of contact" 147), Robinson 182-5 ("participatory observation" 183), Furtak ("Thoreau's representation of the world as emphatically not value-neutral can be viewed as a contribution to phenomenology" 120) and Case "Knowing as Neighboring" and "Radical Empiricism" ("relational epistemology" 194). chance, luck, good fortune, or simply event; happy meant fortunate or prosperous before coming to mean very glad. Thoreau plays on the root of this word in the passage cited above: "There is always some accident in the best things […]. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours" (J 12:39). 7 Thoreau's association of accident with happiness is surprisingly thorough-going. Even natural accidents normally considered tragic because they involve a loss of life are redeemed by the "universal innocence" of nature's ways. He remarks on the universal beauty and health of nature despite the death of individuals, and delights in the fact that nature's abundance is so infinite that accidents can be absorbed without loss: I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp,-tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. (W 318)

The rhetoric here shows that Thoreau deeply enjoys the idea that no accident is truly tragic, and that nature is fundamentally sanguine, even when blood is spilled. This is an extraordinary statement of optimism, akin to our opening passage. Nature-the same nature that Thoreau turns to for solace and healing-is a destroyer, and yet the elemental quality of nature is innocence. Nature knows no tragedy. Despite its violence, nature is ultimately harmonious; it subsumes individual suffering into universal health, the sad into the glad. This is likely what Thoreau meant by saying that joy is inherent in nature itself; in its continuous renewal, whatever happens in nature is happy. It is surely true that his pursuit of happiness in nature is in part motivated by his need to heal from grief, but when we read the extraordinary abundance and variation of his expressions of pleasure and surprise at his discoveries there, it is clear that he also goes walking simply to increase his enjoyment, accumulated during his everyday encounters with nature and overflowing in his journal. Such is Thoreau's stoic epicureanism.

More odd is the contradiction between the statement that the man does not aspire "to much more than an animal content," which presumably means simply eating and sleeping but not exploring any "higher" experiences, and the location of thoroughgoing happiness in every part of nature, including the animals. It would seem that a hint of the traditional scale of being, or the view widespread at the time that posits a hierarchy of existence with humanity at the top-rare in Thoreau-may inform this phrase.

Kristen Case has argued that Thoreau's practices of walking, writing and charting, including the Kalendar project, were a response to loss ("Phenology" 260-1).

"He struggled to achieve what he considered a direct perceptual experience of natural events[…] open to the new, the surprising, or the improbable"(Robinson 183).

On Thoreau's epistemology of "neighboring," see Case, "Knowing."

Thoreau had "a dysteleological understanding of creation, which […] necessarily and extravagantly surpasses the human mind's capacity to anticipate"(Leach 234).

He would also have appreciated the etymology of random, which stems from the Old French randir, to run wild, giving us the modern French randonner, to hike. The deliberate part of his search for surprise is sometimes limited to simply deciding to go for a walk, but without intentional direction; when confronting the uninviting weather of November he writes that "I have to force myself to it often and at random. But then I am often unexpectedly compensated, and the thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of […]" (J 10:203-4).


Danielle Follett

Emerson's Temporalities: The Eternal Present vs. the Not Yet Present

In "Experience," Emerson writes, "Our life seems not present, so much as prospective." 1 Here and elsewhere he expresses an intuition of human and natural vitality as a process of becoming and a progression toward a glimpsable but not yet existent, more harmonious state. "Not for the affairs on which it is wasted," he continues, "but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor" (CW 3:42). That is, our life hints toward the eventual manifestation of the "unbounded substance" -one of his many terms for the divine power -mentioned a few lines earlier. Emerson describes a hopeful path, a "tendency or direction," toward the future realization of something higher that is intimated but not yet actual (CW 3:42). "Life is hereby melted into an expectation or a religion" (CW 3:41).

However, just before and after these passages, and elsewhere in his writings, Emerson also maintains that this ultimate power is always already present in the here and now, and in all our actions: "Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity" (CW 3:45). Underlying and omnipresent, the divine energy not only invests every day and every moment with its immanent force, but it also isolates the present moment from all others, extracting it from linear time, creating a highly charged eternal present: "God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future" (CW 3:39). We are not invited to orient ouselves prospectively towards the future, but rather to experience fully the heightened moment: "'You will not remember,' he seems to say, 'and you will not expect'" (CW 3:39). The charged present instant is self-contained and specifically denies any connection to past or future. Paradoxically, for Emerson, being's grandeur is both yet to come and forever underlying the flux of multiplicity; it is both future and eternally present.

We thus have the juxtaposition of two quite different temporalities: the linear, progressive, teleological temporality of a movement toward a higher state that is heralded but not yet existent; and the instantaneous, spontaneous temporality of heightened spiritual experience manifesting itself in an unending series of present moments, which reject before and after but open onto eternity. This coexistence is witnessed not only in "Experience" but throughout Emerson's writings. What are the relationships between these two temporalities? Can we draw a larger circle around this apparent contradiction, or is this an example of an unresolved or irreducible instability? This article will explore these questions, and argue that the discrepancy between these divergent views of time participates in a fundamental metaphysical tension that informs Emerson's thought.

These issues may only be understood in the light of Emerson's complex spiritual perspectives. A detranscendentalizing critical approach necessarily misses certain metaphysical and religious elements which help explain and contextualize the tensions and paradoxes evident in Emerson's conflicting conceptions of time. 2 Indeed, both of Emerson's temporalities are fundamentally metaphysical and spiritual, though in quite different ways, and it does not make sense to speak of a secular temporality in Emerson. Emerson's thought and philosophy in general are rooted in his lifelong heterodox religious and metaphysical explorations as well as those of his intellectual circle, and cannot be comprehended outside of this context. The detranscendentalizing view of Emerson and other transcendentalists arose during the poststructuralist period, marked by its generally skeptical and anti-metaphysical critical attitude, and has taken the form of analyses that tend to minimize, sideline or negate the religious and metaphysical foundations of transcendentalist thought. [START_REF]For a full discussion of the "detranscendentalizing" critical approach, see Daniel S. Malachuk's introduction to this issue of ESQ, "Re-Transcendentalizing the Transcendentalists," and his "Emerson's Politics, Retranscendentalized[END_REF] George Kateb, struggling to read Emerson as a secular thinker in his Emerson and Self-Reliance, admitted frankly, "It is obvious that I find the religiousness of Emerson an impediment to my reception. ... [T]he fact of pervasive religiousness remains a tremendous problem." [START_REF] Kateb | Emerson and Self-Reliance[END_REF] As Lawrence Buell observed in Emerson in 2003, "Reluctance to imagine Emerson as a religious thinker has lately intensified," but " [t]here is simply no way to ignore the centrality of the religious to the thinking of [this] ex-minister." [START_REF] Buell | [END_REF] His chapter entitled "Religious Radicalisms" constitutes an attempt to reestablish the importance of Emerson's religiosity. Around the same time, David Robinson devoted two articles to the religious aspects of Emerson's philosophy (2000, 2003), Yves Carlet reminded French readers not to forget the spiritual character of transcendentalism (2003), and Daniel S. Malachuk strongly criticized the detranscendentalizing critical approach (2004-2005). [START_REF] Robinson | Emerson and Religion[END_REF] Since then, a handful of studies have appeared that foreground Emerson's metaphysical and religious concerns. In 2007, Randy L. Friedman argued similarly that "it is difficult to ignore the religiosity of [Emerson's] thought," and placed the concept of self-reliance in a metaphysical rather than secular tradition; his 2012 article "Religious Self-Reliance" reads Emerson as a philosopher of religion. [START_REF] Friedman | Traditions of Pragmatism and the Myth of the Emersonian Democrat[END_REF] (2009) founds his analysis of Emerson's liberalism on metaphysical concepts such as universal moral law. [START_REF] Dolan | Emerson's Liberalism[END_REF] Mark S. Cladis and Shira Wolosky each devoted an article to Emerson's religious perspectives in the journal Religion and Literature in 2009. [START_REF] Cladis | on Kateb's attempt to secularize Emerson, see 51-54. Shira Wolosky, "Emerson's Figural Religion: From Poetics to Politics[END_REF] In 2010, Russell B. Goodman analyzed Emerson's essay on nominalism and realism in terms of its metaphysical significance; his earlier works on Emerson also bring a metaphysical perspective to the debate and constitute an exception to the general detranscendentalizing effort of the period. [START_REF] Russell | Paths of Coherence through Emerson's Philosophy: The Case of 'Nominalist and Realist[END_REF] Daniel S. Malachuk's excellent 2011 article "Emerson's Politics, Retranscendentalized" and 2016 Two Cities: The Political Thought of American Transcendentalism demonstrate the centrality of spirituality and metaphysics to Emerson's political thought. [START_REF] Malachuk | Emerson's Politics, Retranscendentalized[END_REF] Alan M. Levine showed that contrary to the detranscendentalizers' assertions, Emerson is ultimately not a Nietzschean skeptic but resolutely affirmative of the divine power (2011). [START_REF] Levine | Skeptical Triangle? A Comparison of the Political Thought of Emerson, Nietzche and Montaigne[END_REF] Samantha Harvey's insightful analyses of Coleridge's and Emerson's philosophies of nature are sensitive to metaphysical issues (2013). [START_REF] Harvey | Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson and Nature[END_REF] My 2015 article analyzes Emerson's immanentist metaphysics and the dissonances created within it by his occasional dualism. [START_REF] Follett | The Tension between Immanence and Dualism in Coleridge and Emerson[END_REF] Finally, Joseph Urbas's important series of articles (2009, 2010, 2013) and his groundbreaking Emerson's Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes (2016) argue in convincing detail that Emerson's philosophy is fundamentally a spiritual ontology whose first principle is causation, and which grew out of the metaphysical concerns of his time. [START_REF] Urbas | True Romance': Emerson's Realism[END_REF] In keeping with the "retranscendentalizing" bent of these studies, I will claim that Emerson's conceptions of time are rooted in his religious and metaphysical views and reflect their complexity. It would be difficult to detranscendentalize such statements as "The present hour is the descending God." [START_REF]Duty[END_REF] Emerson was a syncretistic spiritual thinker, and his different conceptions of time are rooted in his various philosophical and religious influences, which when brought together do not always fully cohere. Clearly, the linear, progressive temporality is related to Emerson's view of history as advancing toward a greater future, a view anchored in his background and his century. The general Protestant eschatological sense of time combines in Unitarianism with an Enlightenment scientific progressivism, which is reinforced in Emerson's early readings by Scottish common-sense rationalism and overlaid with a teleological sense of biological evolution, creating a syncretic progressivism. This perspective is helpfully summarized by Neal Dolan, who writes: "one of the most striking features of Emerson's work from [1833] forward is the way he folds a conception of inexorable human progress into the larger evolutionary flow of cosmic deep time." [START_REF] Dolan | History[END_REF] Expressions of this view abound in Emerson's writings; for example we see it in "The Poet" in the term "ascension," which carries both biological and spiritual meanings: "But nature has a higher end, in the production of new individuals, than security, namely, ascension, or, the passage of the soul into higher forms" (CW 3:14). It is reflected on a social level in the optimistic exhortations given in "The Young American": "Remark the unceasing effort throughout nature at somewhat better than the actual creatures: amelioration in nature, which alone permits and authorizes amelioration in mankind. The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, of gases, animals and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God" (CW 1:230-231).

We see a similar expression of teleological metamorphosis and progressive evolutionary time in the second epigraph to Nature: "And, striving to be man, the worm / Mounts through all the spires of form" (CW 1:7). The progressive temporality often takes the form of hope and expectation. In his "Introductory Lecture" to the series "Lectures on the Times," Emerson speaks of the "promise" and "tendency" of the times, or its directionality: "Let us not inhabit times of wonderful and various promise without once divining their tendency" (CW 1:171). The eschatological perspective clearly appears in "the Transcendentalist": "Our American literature and spiritual history are, we confess, in the optative mood … I know that which shall come will cheer me. … Patience, then, is for us, is it not? Patience, and still patience. … presently we shall [pass] into some new infinitude, out of this Iceland of negations" (CW 1:207, 212, 214).

The entreaty for patience recalls "The American Scholar": "Patience-patience;-with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life … A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men." (CW 1:69, 70). And this brings us back to "Experience": "Patience and patience, we shall win at the last" (CW 3:48-49). One of Emerson's moods is certainly, as he says, optative.

On the other hand, the temporality of the infinite moment, the "everlasting Now," partakes in the enthusiastic tradition of divine immanence within the visionary subject and within the world, as well as the romantic epiphanic tradition and valorization of the ordinary and the everyday. [START_REF]An everlasting Now reigns in Nature that produces on our bushes the selfsame Rose which charmed the Roman and the Chaldaean" (EL 1:71). See also "Works and Days[END_REF] The highest spiritual force invests the "lowest" and most common experience, from Blake's "Eternity in an hour" ("Auguries of Innocence") through Wordsworth's and Coleridge's celebrations of the spiritual import of everyday experiences, to Emerson's moment as a transparent eyeball, crossing the "bare common" (CW 1:10). 20 He writes in "The Oversoul": But the soul that ascends to worship the great God… dwells in the hour that now is, in the earnest experience of the common day,-by reason of the present moment and the mere trifle having become porous to thought and bibulous of the sea of light. … The universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time (CW 2:172, 175).

In the minutest measure of time ("the hour that now is," "the common day,") and the most ordinary objects ("the bare common," "the mere trifle," "an atom"), the infinite and eternal is manifested. Whereas in his analysis of Emerson's philosophy Stanley Cavell both focuses on the concept of the everyday and simultaneously disparages metaphysics as "empty," for Emerson at least, the everyday is an eminently metaphysical concept. [START_REF] Cavell | Emerson's Transcendental Etudes[END_REF] Far from representing the negation of the metaphysical concept of eternity, the value of the ordinary moment is for him precisely its capacity to contain eternity. Similarly, the significance of the most common or everyday objects and experiences is that they may be invested with an uncommon or extraordinary (divine) power. The everyday contains "the highest spiritual cause," as he states in "The American Scholar": I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. … show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;-and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench (CW 1:67-68).

The common, low, ordinary and everyday are for Emerson inextricably linked to the highest, most extraordinary and eternal, in the same way that he emphasizes the inseparable polarities of "Unity in Variety" (CW 1:27), "Each and All" (CW 9:14-15), macrocosm and microcosm, which together make the whole; or as he writes in "Compensation," "the universe is represented in every one of its particles" (CW 2:59). [START_REF]For "each and all[END_REF] Particularity for Emerson never exists only in and for itself, isolated from the whole, but represents or expresses something higher than itself; nor does this link with the whole detract from the individuality or intrinsic value of the particular. Joseph Urbas describes this "synthesis": "Emerson has a firm metaphysical commitment to the Real [the universal] that does not mean depreciating the 'lower' realms of our variegated existence." [START_REF] Urbas | Bi-Polar Emerson[END_REF] Rather, Emerson repeatedly expresses a monistic, panentheistic balance of unity and particularity which somewhat paradoxically upholds the integrity of both. This point is important as detranscendentalists have occasionally accused Emerson's philosophy of violently subjugating particularity into a foreign whole. George Kateb laments: "The particular thing … is a mere part of the All; it has no meaning in itself. … The world suffers a great reduction by this attempted elevation. … Everything in this world is denied intrinsic or self-sufficient value." [START_REF] Kateb | [END_REF] This radically particularist interpretation misses the significance of Emerson's hen kai pan as a philosophy of interconnected particularity and a monistic synthesis or balance between unity and difference which is conceived as doing justice to both poles. For Emerson, particularity has an intimate relation with the whole, just as the instant is united to the eternal.

The epiphanic and spiritual value of the present instant is the subject of the second part of Emerson's fascinating essay "Works and Days," in which he celebrates "the deep today":

It was the deep to-day which all men scorn; the rich poverty, which men hate; the populous, all-loving solitude, which men quit for the tattle of towns. HE [sic] lurks, he hides,-he who is success, reality, joy, and power. One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday. 'Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. [Emerson here lists the Norse, Hindu, Greek and Christian legends in which divinity visits the lowest members of society.] … We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and pedlers. … Do not refuse the employment which the hour brings you, for one more ambitious. … [A]n old French sentence says, "God works in moments" (CW 7:88-89, 90).

The deep today, inhabited already and always by the lurking gods, contains its value in itself, and not in its role as a necessary link toward some later, better date. The hour is not considered critical and decisive here because of the future-oriented tasks that will be accomplished now; rather it is significant because of the success, joy, or higher power it already contains, regardless of what we do. Far from offering an eschatological perspective, here "every day is Doomsday." There is no exhortation toward patience. The present is not part of a project, but is the accomplishment itself, as the immediate dwelling-place of divinity. Emerson continues:

And him I reckon the most learned scholar, not who can unearth for me the buried dynasties of Sesostris and Ptolemy, the Sothiac era, the Olympiads and consulships, but who can unfold the theory of this particular Wednesday. Can he uncover the ligaments concealed from all but piety, which attach the dull men and things we know to the First Cause? These passing fifteen minutes, men think, are time, not eternity; are low and subaltern, are but hope or memory, that is, the way to or the way from welfare, but not welfare. Can he show their tie? That interpreter shall guide us from a menial and eleemosynary existence into riches and stability (CW 7:91) Emerson dismisses hope and memory in the interest of the simple experience of the present instant. The day's isolation from linear temporality, and relation only to the higher power, has an analogue in the self which is reliant not on custom or tradition but only on the inner divine light, celebrated in "Self-Reliance." Just below this passage, Emerson makes the analogy between the day and the self explicit: "you must be a day yourself, and not interrogate it like a college professor" (CW 7:91). Indeed, the end of "Works and Days" recalls the earlier essay: "There are people … who have self-existence and self-help; who are suffered to be themselves in society; who are great in the present … What he is will appear in every gesture and syllable. In this way the moment and the character are one" (CW 7:93). The self and the day fuse when both are perfectly self-reliant. Both essays encourage the reader to let go of past and future, to dismiss memories and plans, and to trust one's spontaneous thoughts and actions in the present moment. The essay "Self-Reliance" describes the relation between divinity and the heightened instant thus: "Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away,-means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now and absorbs past and future into the present hour" (CW 2:38). The earlier version of this passage, from the lecture "Duty" (1839), is even more explicit about the spiritual temporality of the isolated moment: "[the soul] lives now and not from the past. The present hour is the descending God, and all things obey. All the past exists to it as subordinate. All the future is contained in it" (EL 3:141). The present contains all time as though it were itself a seed of eternity. This atemporal instant is "above time," as Emerson writes in "Self-Reliance":

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leafbud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower, there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time (CW 2:38-39).

The rose is not oriented toward the past or the future but exists outside of time, above it, in a timeless present -an experience of the present that it behooves humanity to imitate. [START_REF]For Guthrie's readings of this passage, which provides the title of his book[END_REF] Emerson uses the eloquent term "the deep present" in the first version of this passage (JMN 7:226 [1839]). The moral valorization of the isolated instant is echoed in "Experience": "To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. … Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today" (CW 3:35). Emerson's descriptions of the value of the heightened moment specifically preclude an awareness of or orientation toward the future, but rather sever it from any linear temporality.

We thus have on one hand a progressive, forward-looking time, a linear advance of events whose identity is defined by their place in a chronological ascension, and on the other hand we have an instantaneous and timeless present experience whose eyes are closed to any other moment but its own, but open onto eternity. Eschatological time contrasts with epiphanic time. In human lived experience, these take the form of a constant thought of what is (hopefully) to come, and an oblivion of past or future. Perhaps this apparently dissonant overlap is ultimately unproblematic: perhaps the larger view or circle encompassing both could be understood as a linear, teleological time punctuated by a series of timeless moments each advancing toward a higher future. But this possible solution calls up a number of questions. On a phenomenological level, it would be difficult to both consciously anticipate and forget the future. This idea would also imply that the thickened instant of today is somehow better than that of yesterday, and worse than that of tomorrow, which Emerson explicitly denies. And it creates an ambiguity as to whether eternity is only final -after time -or present at every moment -above time. There seems to be a contradiction; we are obliged to recognize that it is difficult to coordinate the two.

James Guthrie, in his book Above Time: Emerson's and Thoreau's Temporal

Revolutions discusses each of the two temporalities, but does not spend long on their relations. He claims that the two coincide unproblematically, by arguing that time progresses via timeless moments; without them, there would be no progress. Speaking of the heightened present moments, he writes: "Absent these insights into eternity, however, Emerson thought time did not 'move,' or advance toward the condition of unity and perfection posited by his progressive and developmental teleology." [START_REF] Guthrie | Guthrie also suggests that because humanity is unseated from the endpoint of evolution, as stated in "Fate[END_REF] That is, the fact of instantaneous timelessness allows linear time to move forward. This is conceivably possible, and would constitute one way of making sense of the situation, but it is an affirmation without real substantiation in the texts, and ultimately it maintains rather than explains the paradox.

Stanley Cavell also evokes this imbrication of temporalities in his Conditions

Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, and, one might say, ratchets up the paradox even more tightly. [START_REF] Cavell | Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism[END_REF] Despite the future orientation inherent in Cavell's concept of perfectionism of the self (his term "perfectionism" may arguably be understood to be akin to the progressive temporality), he states that every moment, day or state is equally valuable. [START_REF] Urbas | Cavell's 'Moral Perfectionism'") argues convincingly that Cavell's theory of perfectionism is inconsistent with Emerson's philosophy. 29[END_REF] He speaks of "Emerson's sense … that each state of the self is, so to speak, final: each state constitutes a world (a circle, Emerson says) and it is one each one also desires … On such a picture of the self one could say both that significance is always deferred and equally that it is never deferred." 29 ("Significance" would seem to be in this context analogous to Emerson's various terms for that which is to come, or alternatively that which already invests the everyday -thus a secularized version of what he calls, in the above citations, "vast-flowing vigor," "unbounded substance," "the ill-concealed deity," "some new infinitude," "the highest spiritual cause," that is, the divine principle.) This significant entity is both never and always deferred. Rather than tackling the contradiction, Cavell rides it. Commenting on Emerson's quite progressivist phrase from "History," (CW 2:5) the "unattained but attainable self," Cavell writes: "our position is always (already) that of an attained self ... the self is always attained, as well as to be attained … That one way or the other a side of the self is in negation -either the attainable negates the attained or vice versa -is the implication I drew earlier in saying that each state of the self is final." 30 Cavell here recognizes that the two are contradictory (they negate each other) but tightens rather than clarifies the paradox by declaring the simple simultaneity of opposites. He goes on to say that the idea that every state of the self is final could be a useful backstop against the risk of perfectionism sounding metaphysical due to its teleological overtones:

[W]hy do I call it perfectionism, incurring or toying with metaphysical suggestions I say I want no part of? Most significant is the suggestion of a state, the same for all, at which the self is to arrive, a fixed place at which it is destined to come home to itself. Is it worth this risk of suggestion to be able to say, as if blocking the metaphysical with a paradox, that each state of the self is final? … I might answer this by saying that it is a mission of Emersonian Perfectionism precisely to struggle against false or debased perfectionisms…. 31 Cavell desires to use the present and the everyday -in this case, the idea that every state of the self is final and valuable in itself -as an antidote to (teleological) metaphysics, which may be one way to explain Cavell's, but not Emerson's, paradox. However, as described earlier, for Emerson the everyday is a highly metaphysical concept. Cavell's interpretation of the present day divests it of its epiphanic quality. Cavell later attempts to bring the two temporal perspectives together by arguing that perfectibility must take place every day, in the moment, and urgently; quoting "The American Scholar" (CW 1:66), he writes: In Emerson's way of speaking, "one day" ("Each philosopher … has only done, [for me,] as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself") always also means today; the life he urgently speaks for is one he forever says is not to be postponed. It is today that you are to take the self on; today that you are to awaken and consecrate yourself to culture, specifically, to domesticate it gradually, which means to bring it home, as part, now, of your everyday life. This is Perfectionism's moral urgency. … Domestication in Emerson is the issue, or urgency, of the day, today, one among others, an achievement of the everyday, the ordinary, now, here, again, never again." [START_REF] Cavell | Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 54-5, 61. Cavell omits the "for me[END_REF] However, Emerson's deep today is not imbued with urgency: "Cannot we let the morning be?" ("Works and Days, CW: 7:91). Rather than enjoining us to undertake something we "are to" do or achieve this day, Emerson asks this Thoreauvian question. As we have seen, the value of the present hour for Emerson is not in its role as a stepping stone to any future state; this instrumentalization of the present day in the interest of perfectionism is quite different from Emerson's valorization of timeless present moments in and for themselves, referring to neither past nor future. Emerson's everyday is the opposite of urgent: simple acceptance of what is. There is no further perfecting possible. "There is simply the rose … Its nature is satisfied" (CW 2:38, 39). Cavell shifts the emphasis of the instant's importance from being to becoming, making the everyday serve the realization of some larger project, something not yet manifested: the gradual domestication of culture, "the higher or further self," "the aspiration to the human," "finding a home for humanity" -all part of the "overcoming or overtaking of skepticism [which] must constitute a revolution that is a domestication for philosophy." 33 Inserting the everyday into a long-term project of perfectionism of the self or the overcoming of skepticism would be another way of attempting to make sense of Emerson's paradox, not unlike Guthrie's in that it also gives priority to progressive time. But it does not do justice to Emerson's striking intuition of the truly timeless everyday.

One might note in passing that Cavell's take on Emerson's views of time is a good example of his critical approach of riffing on his authors, that is, using them as a jumping off point for his own philosophical reflections, an approach that is highly evocative and stimulating but not always precise or closely attentive to the original text. [START_REF] Joseph | How Close a Reader of Emerson Is Stanley Cavell?[END_REF] His avoidance of Emerson's many metonyms for the divine, and his focus on the experience and evolution of the self in isolation rather than as representative for, expressive of, or reliant upon something higher, illustrate his detranscendentalizing tendency toward conceptual reduction and the draining of the metaphysical from Emerson's thought. [START_REF] Cavell | For a critique of Cavell's interpretation of Emerson's self as self-contained and metaphysically ungrounded, see Urbas[END_REF] Cavell turned to Emerson for aid in his lifelong grappling with skepticism, an agonistic embrace of an entity he can neither definitively throttle nor release, because he defines philosophy in relation to it: "philosophy's essential business has become the response to skepticism." 36 The everyday, a concept derived partly from Emerson, was enlisted in this effort; philosophy's task is understood as both "the recovery of the (my) ordinary (voice) from skepticism" and "the overcoming, or say critique, of metaphysics." 37 Because Cavell is concerned above all with skepticism, he focuses on Emerson's infrequent skeptical passages and sees in him both a fellow skeptic and an ally whose valorization of the everyday might aid in the "response" to skepticism. More precisely, Cavell projects his own profound ontological skepticism about foundations onto Emerson's passing moments of epistemological skepticism about senses and illusions. [START_REF] Emerson | Degérando's statement in his journal: "it was of the external world and never of metaphysical truths that he was skeptical saith DeG. It was Idealism which he maintained[END_REF] Emerson indeed has rare skeptical moments, especially in "Experience," but as several scholars have shown, his fundamental philosophy (even in that essay) is not skeptical but one of strong spiritual and metaphysical affirmation. [START_REF] Levine | Skeptical Triangle?" especially 246-249; Malachuk[END_REF] What Cavell writes about Dewey's interpretation of Emerson could as easily be said of his own: it "reads like a poignant wish to find something in Emerson's achievement that he could put to use in his own work." 40 A more Emersonian recovery of the ordinary from skepticism would be to return it to metaphysics.

How then should we understand or clarify the coexistence of Emerson's two ways of viewing temporality? It seems difficult to draw a larger circle around them. Rather than trying to embrace or embroider the paradox or, on the other hand, to reduce it to one of the perspectives, we should simply recognize this situation as an unresolved tension within Emerson's thought, and try to contextualize it. This is not the only inconsistency Emerson deals us; witness for example his lifelong tangle of fate and freedom. Emerson's juxtaposed, contrasting views of time seem to be an example of an unabsorbable, uncircumscribable contradiction. Although a paradox or simple contradiction may be unresolvable, it need not be abandoned as such, and may be clarified to a degree through contextualization. To make better sense of this situation it is necessary to look more closely at Emerson's metaphysics. In many ways, these two views of time correspond to two contrasting metaphysical perspectives that Emerson adopts simultaneously throughout his life, to differing and fluctuating degrees, and often in the same writings: dualism and immanentism (or more precisely, panentheism). [START_REF] Harvey | On panentheism[END_REF] Emerson is generally a panentheist; his occasional expressions of dualism create slight incongruities within his fundamental monistic metaphysics of immanence. [START_REF]The Tension between Immanence and Dualism." 43 On the "causing power" and the importance of causality in Emerson's metaphysics, see Urbas, Emerson's Metaphysics. 44 Goodman[END_REF] Note that immanence is not pantheistic monism, which posits that the divine and the world are identical; Emerson views the divine power as infusing and inhabiting the world but remaining superior to it. Emerson's immanentism -influenced by Wordsworth, Goethe, Swedenborg, Boehme, Cudworth, the classical Neoplatonists, and others, as well as the Protestant enthusiastic tradition of divine inspiration -is on view almost everywhere in his writings, in his many and varied assertions of the omnipresence of dynamic, divine energy as well as the unity and relatedness of humans and cosmos. It witnesses the eternal flux of being's tide circulating throughout all of existence and humanity: "an instantaneous instreaming causing power" (CW 1:43). 43 In innumerable passages, the immanence of the sacred force in nature is directly perceived with the senses, revealing the unity between the perceiving subject, the world and the divine. The temporality of the everlasting now has its source in Emerson's metaphysics of immanence, and invokes the experience of an "instantaneous" and immediate relation or identity between the present and the eternal.

On the other hand, the progressive temporality is rooted in Emerson's idealist and Christian dualism, distinguishing between the lower and the higher, between the here and the hereafter, between the temporal and the eternal worlds, and posits a linear ascent from one to the other. Emerson's dualism is influenced by his Protestant past and environment as well as his readings in German idealism, Plato and the Vedantic tradition. It manifests itself in occasional passages that emphasize a split or a felt absence of relation between self and world or spirit and nature, as well as in his infrequent idealist terminology of subject/object, and in various moments of subjective idealist skepticism as to the reality of the external world. He expresses such a division between humanity and nature as well as a doubt of sense perceptions in several passages in the "Idealism" section of Nature -passages which do not cohere with the general immanentism of that book -and in "Experience," for example. In terms of temporality, this dualism is conveyed in the idea of the "not yet": the awareness of a difference between present and future experience, the idea that this present state is inferior to the future one but is progressing toward it, and the feeling that we await, expect and hope for but do not immediately experience that coming grandeur, that "vast-flowing vigor" toward which our present day "hint[s]" (CW 3:42). Emerson thus variously maintains both dualistic and immanentist perspectives toward time. In a similar vein (though a somewhat different context), Russell B. Goodman writes: "the dualism (of dream and reality) that Emerson seems to embrace is countered by an equally strong sense that this world, the world we experience, contains all the divinity we shall ever need or find." 44 For Emerson, it seems, the highest being is both, or alternately, ever to come and perpetually present. This double metaphysical background may help us explain some of the slight inconsistencies that we find in Emerson's thinking about time. Although the rose exists in the timeless instant "in all moments alike," Emerson says occasionally that we humans experience the eternal epiphanic moments only intermittently, or even rarely. For example, in "Montaigne," Emerson writes: "Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended now and then for a serene and profound moment amidst the hubbub of cares and works which have no direct bearing on it;-is then lost, for months or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours" (CW 4:101). And in "The American Scholar": "the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months" (CW 1:58). This inconsistency regarding the frequency of such moments may possibly be explained by an incursion of Emerson's occasional dualism into his fundamental monistic immanence: a dualistic split between humanity and nature comes to inflect the immanentist temporality of heightened moments. Humans and roses experience time differently. The deep present is continuously experienced by the rose, but not by humanity; humans postpone and anticipate, remember and lament; roses do not. We live -at least frequently -in the progressive temporality, while nature lives in the eternal present moment of pure immanence. Theoretically, in a simple monism, humans and nature would operate in the same way; we would have the same uninterrupted relationship with "the prized reality, the Law" as do roses. But Emerson tells us occasionally that the epiphanic moments are seldom. The heightened experience of the everyday is not every day; these moments are grounded in the commonplace, but they are not common. This creates a dissonance between the two senses of the word "common" (ordinary and frequent): crossing the commons, Emerson has, according to some of his statements, an uncommon experience.

This imbrication of contrasting temporalities may help explain such paradoxical passages as the following: "[Man] cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time" ("Self-Reliance," CW 2:39). Oddly, the timeless present moment is said to be in the future. The first version of this passage is even more revealing of the tension between the two overlapping temporalities: "So shall Man one day live with living nature, happy & strong in the deep present. There is no time to just men" (JMN 7:226 [1839]). We have here both the monistic experience of living in the deep present, and the dualistic projection of that better moment into the future. The deep present is not now, but "one day." Eschatological time collides with epiphanic time, and the eternal moment paradoxically takes on the optative mood. These tensions are encapsulated poignantly in the following exclamation in the journal: "Ah when! Ah how rarely! can he draw a true Aeolian note from the harp" ( JMN 11: 373 [1851]). [START_REF]experiences shame or guilt for not living up to their promise (CW 9:427) In this context, Guthrie[END_REF] The wind harp is a model for the self traversed by the immanent divine forces, resulting in song or poetry. Theoretically true aeolian notes should not be rare, as the wind blows almost continuously through a wind harp, the quintessential figure for the ever-present immanence of the divine breath in nature. The wind is an everyday and common phenomenon. But Emerson feels here that it seldom visits his or humanity's harp, and this anxious experience of spotty immanence contrasts sharply with the continuous and reposed immanence of the rose.

Emerson thus juxtaposes two contrasting temporalities, a monistic valorization of the heightened present moment, and a dualistic orientation toward a better future moment. The two do not cohere easily, and it seems difficult to draw a larger circle around the opposition. His two temporalities coexist with a gentle tension, giving rise to paradoxes and contradictions. Full consistency would surely be too much to ask, and we would be only chasing hobgoblins. Rather, Emerson's views of time are fluctuating, creating a poetic complexity.

  Robert Milder's two articles in The New England Quarterly (2007, 2014) are accounts of Emerson's evolving spiritual views, focusing respectively on what Milder considers (problematically, I believe) Emerson's late Calvinism and his "Godless religion." 8 Neal Dolan's Emerson's Liberalism

The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Joseph Slater et al., 7 vols. to date (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971-), 3:42; hereafter cited parenthetically as CW, with volume and page number.

The term was first used by Lawrence Buell ("The Emerson Industry in the 1980s: A Survey of Trends and Achievements," ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance

30:2 [1984], 117-136, 120), and was taken up in the title of Michael Lopez's article "De-transcendentalizing Emerson," ESQ 34:1-2 (1988), 77-139.