A Man Out Of Time

Lawrence Buell is perhaps the greatest living scholar of Emerson and his monograph on the Sage of the Way, the fruit of many decades of reading, thinking about, and teaching Emerson, is without peer.

The Mazeppist cannot claim to be a scholar of Emerson; but he has been, from his early teens (when he inherited his grandmother's copy of The Complete Writings, pub. 1929), an Emersonian. Since then, he has investigated the various lines of Emersonian descent: Emerson-Thoreau; Emerson-Whitman; Emerson-Melville; Emerson-Dickinson; Emerson-Nietzsche, etc. But, to what end?

Emerson was a walking University of the Spirit, admonishing all to find the creative spark within (what he wished to call "the Divine").

The religio-political radicalism that finds its impetus in this School is no longer legible in our contemporary confusion. The Mazeppist, like one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, is--admittedly--a man out of time.