July 30, 2003
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Transcendental Meditation
Transcendental Man
New books on
Ralph Waldo Emerson
for his bicentennial.
by John Updike
The bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson was on May 25, 2003. For a commemoration of Emerson on that date, click on the picture below of Harvard University’s Room 305, Emerson Hall.
This will lead you to a discussion of the properties of a 5×5 array, or matrix, with a symbol of mystical unity at its center. Although this symbol of mystical unity, the number “1,” is not, pace the Shema, a transcendental number, the matrix is, as perhaps a sort of Emersonian compensation, what postmodernists would call phallologocentric. It is possible that Emerson is a saint; if so, his feast day (i.e., date of death), April 27, might reveal to us the sort of miraculous fact hoped for by Fritz Leiber
in my previous entry. A check of my April 27 notes shows us, lo and behold, another phallologocentric 5×5 array, this one starring Warren Beatty. This rather peculiar coincidence is, perhaps, the sort of miracle appropriate to a saint who is, as this week’s politically correct New Yorker calls him, a Big Dead White Male.
Leiber’s fiction furnishes “a behind-the-scenes view of the time change wars.”
“It’s quarter to three…” — St. Frank Sinatra
