We all receive a criminally small quota of a certain type of evening.  One of mine involved a girl with brown eyes and hair, a fire, and a wind that rolled off the ocean like warm breath.  She and I had agreed to just be friends, but then she began reading Emerson out loud to me.

(You have to understand: this was Northern California.  Winona Ryder grew up in a commune here.  The Grateful Dead first played here.  Beat poets scribbled out chaotic verses and threw up on each other.  Reading Emerson is an acceptable seduction technique among many of my people.)

She read from Emerson’s essay, “Nature”:

...my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal being circulate through me.

And I started a little, having been lulled by the sound of her voice and the gentle, agreeable mysticism of the words--transparent eyeball?

What the hell was that?  Why would he use such a ridiculous image?  What did it mean?

If you looked through a transparent eyeball, could you see the back of someone’s head?

If you used a transparent eyeball as a marble, wouldn’t it be easy to lose?

Do you have to continuously add drops in order to keep it transparent?

And the evening continued, and she eventually put the book down.  The fire snapped and the wind breathed, and although it was, really, a near perfect evening, the thought lodged in my mind: Why a transparent eyeball? It was a pop song stuck in my head.  It was a pebble trapped in my shoe.

Years later I sat in a claustrophobic classroom, one of the last courses I had to take for an advanced English degree.  Sun poured through the windows and baked the room.  I was worried about my thesis.  I was worried about getting a job.  Stress had riddled my forehead with acne.  Sweat trickled down my face; my head throbbed.

The professor said, “Now let’s turn to Emerson’s ‘Nature,’ and in particular his famous discussion of the transparent eyeball.” She proceeded to bring her full faculties to bear on the interpretation, drawing upon years of personal research and study.

She teased out the phrase’s every possible meaning and subtext, illuminating its many facets, laying it bare before us.  I found it difficult to listen. Tugging at my thoughts, like a pop song in my head or a pebble in my shoe, was a girl, a fire, and a wind like breath.