Mid-Winter Emerson

4 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Mid-Winter Emerson Six weeks at a sunny writers' retreat and now I'm descending in snow. Passengers are shutting down their laptops. When we land, they'll start up their cell phones and chatter will reign: arrival, baggage, meeting places. I shut my eyes, and return to Emerson's journals, his belief we were made for ecstasy and his fear of just that, most days grounding himselfin a miscellany of chores and the weather. Mid-way through his life, he wrote about finding himselfon a stair, with steps below, but many more above, climbing out of sight, unreachable because ofthe sleep clouding our eyes even when we're awake. To climb, all he needed to do was walk outside and be startled by a blue jay's alarm, or the way its jay blue breaks through the gray and white stillness of January... We'velanded. I collect my things and myself. Emerson always knew how it would gothat knock at the door, more than likely, Henry, come to town to drag him away to God knows what, and he, book and house bound, making excuses for the work he must do on a talk about the narrow passageway between insanityandfat dullness, shoehorned between two worlds, as he is now, in my hand, among all of us rushing to get home or to get away, moving up and down the airport escalators. ROBERT CORDING ...