Of the many pockets of wisdom in Mary Oliver's last collection of essays, my favorite is her short introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Does Emerson need an introduction? This man who lent Thoreau the land to experience his life of deliberation and who encouraged Whitman to pursue poetry and articulated a way of transcendent thinking that many, especially Oliver, embody today?

Oliver's introduction is a more eulogized biography: a piece full of clarity, interest, and love for the things that made Emerson worthy of such a mention a century after his life.

Emerson.

Of particular interest to Oliver is how Emerson's steadfast inner examination grew into a way of life.

Emerson graduated from Harvard College, then divinity school, and in 1829 began preaching at Second Church (Unitarian) in Boston. In that year he also married the beautiful but frail Ellen Tucker. Her health never improved, and in 1831 she died. Emerson was then twenty-nine years old.

I think it is fair to say that from this point on, the greater energies of his life found their sustenance in richness and the steadfastness of his inner life. Soon after Ellen Tucker's death, he left the pulpit. He had come on to believe that the taking of the sacrament was no more, nor was meant to be more, than an act of spiritual remembrance. This disclosure he made to this congregation, who perhaps were grateful for his forthrightness but, in all honesty, did not wish to keep such a preacher. Soon after, Emerson booked passage to Europe. He was deeply touched by the magnificence of the past, so apparent in the cities, in their art and architecture.

Emerson's poem to his wife Ellen Tucker (from my beloved copy of Emerson's little-known poetry.)

Excited to push forward, Emerson returned to America. His mental and spiritual work would, in Oliver's words, "Reach forth and touch both poles: his certainty and his fluidity." His quest for satiating expression led to not narrowing toward answers but expanding into "rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted logics."

The thought process of thought itself - losing oneself in compounding contemplation - was to become the focus of Emerson's writing. In 1836, he published a series of essays titled Nature, which laid the foundations of transcendentalism, which "presupposes from the heart's spiritual awakening as the true work of our lives."

Read Emerson's early mind in his own words:

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man but shines into the eye and the heart of a child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other, who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
From Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature

Oliver continues:

This is the crux of Emerson, who does not advance straight ahead but wanders to all sides of an issue: who delivers suggestions with a kindly gesture - who opens doors and tells us to look for things ourselves. The one thing he is adamant about is that we should look - we must look - for that is the liquor of life, that brooding upon issues, that attention to thought even as we weed the garden or milk the cow. 

Emerson was an imagined mentor to Oliver, and she represents a stunning contemporary interpretation of 19th-century New England transcendentalism. Her poetry lingers on voices in the reeds and requires solace from the world's neediness. As Oliver grapples with Emerson, she also extracts central truths of this often confusing "philosophy" (which is not entirely a philosophy).

The culmination of this thinking was what we know as New England transcendentalism, a nebulous philosophy that embodied something different for each of its members but can be coalesced into general parameters outlined by Emerson in his first book Nature, a short tract that sublimates man, divinity and everything around us that is not of us.

For Emerson, the value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this swerving and rolling away from the acute definition. All the world is taken in through the eye to reach the soul, where it becomes more representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in, patiently, and radiantly, the universe exists.

The world is consumed through the eye (tactile and sensual), and yet, "As we weed the garden or milk the cow," there is a touch of unbounded feeling. For all his lofty questioning of ideal realms (where God may or may not reside), Emerson was equally interested in the domestic, home-making realm. Similarly, Henry David Thoreau's sojourn into the area around Walden Pond was not about solitude or living simply but about living deliberately. Its pages are full of gardening, chimney building, and roof hatching - the deliberate, self-directed aspects of a domestic life.

"Interior of Netherhall" by engraver Howard Phipps.

As Emerson nurtured and balanced his internal polemics of fluidity and certainty, of domestic and ideal, he also developed his style for both writing and public speaking (which he did significantly more than we realize.)

It is no simple matter to be both inspirational and moderate. Emerson's trick - I use this word in no belittling sense - was to fill his essays with "things" at the same time that his subject was conceptual, invisible, no more than a glimmer, but a glimmer of immeasurable sharpness inside the eye. So he attached the common word to the startling idea. "Hitch your wagon to a star," he advised. "The drop is a small ocean." "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." "We live amid surfaces, and the art of life is to skate well on them." "Sleep lingers in all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree." The writing is a pleasure to the ear, and thus tonic to the heart, at the same time that it strikes the mind.

The thick, layered human continuum of thought and consciousness is fastened by these knots of remembrance, a form of literature I call 'biography plus eulogy.' What I think of Emerson is enhanced three-fold when I learn Oliver's thoughts. Considered thought upon thought upon thought that eventually compounds and - as Emerson predicted - transcends.