Re-reading Emerson

I spent this morning re-reading Emerson's Nature, which I hadn't read since 2007 or so, the last time I taught it. Today, though, I remembered when I first read it--back in my senior year at Roanoke, back when I really fell in love with nineteenth-century American literature. I have this clear memory of walking back to my room one night after getting off work in the spring of 1999. I looked up at the stars and thought of this passage:

"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."

It was a scary, kind of uncertain time of my life--finishing college, getting ready to start the next part of my life, leaving my friends, and a place that had become home to me. Those words from Emerson brought me comfort and courage, as so many of these Transcendentalist texts did and still do. And now, nearly 15 years later, I am glad to have that memory.