Transcendentalism

The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks before coughing up the question that had dogged him since he first read Emerson: Why am I “I”? Like musk oxen we hunkered while his lecture drifted against us like snow. If we could, we would have turned our backs into the wind. I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too, a quiet little interlude from everyone outside rooting up the corpse of literature for being too Caucasian. There was a simple answer to my own question (how come no one loved me, stomping on the pedals of my little bicycle): I was insufferable. So, too, was Emerson I bet, though I liked If the red slayer think he slays— the professor drew a giant eyeball to depict the Over-soul. Then he read a chapter from his own book: naptime. He didn’t care if our heads tipped forward on their stalks. When spring came, he even threw us a picnic in his yard where dogwood bloomed despite a few last dirty bergs of snow. He was a wounded animal being chased across the tundra by those wolves, the postmodernists. At any moment you expected to see blood come dripping through his clothes. And I am I who never understood his question, though he let me climb to take a seat aboard the wooden scow he’d been building in the shade of thirty-odd years. How I ever rowed it from his yard, into my life—remains a mystery. The work is hard because the eyeball’s heavy, riding in the bow.