Transparent eyeball

This process requires absolute solitude, as he notes that "a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society"[1] to uninhabited places like the woods where— [...] we return to reason and faith.

"[1] Emerson's argument is that outer and inner vision merge to reveal perceived symbolic connections, making the natural world into a personal landscape of freedom.

Going further than this finite perception of freedom, the transparent eyeball merges with what it sees, thus making this unity immediate, especially between the self and God, losing grip of the biases and contradictions that the self previously made when within nature.

It follows, then, that Emerson's religiosity may be read as natural and not supernatural, which may account for his centrality in a tradition of arts and letters which dates to his decisive split with organized religion."

"Transcendentalists believe that finding God depended on neither orthodox (Christianity) nor the Unitarians' sensible exercise of virtue, but on one's inner striving toward spiritual communion with the divine spirit.

Walker spent his career during the Great Depression trying to capture images that would be a mirror representation of Americans surrounded by both nature and man-made objects existing in total harmony.

Emerson's description of the "transparent eyeball" functions as a metaphor for the artist's ability to discern the essential nature of objects and as a way to stress that the transcendental is not formless.

The "transparent eyeball" reflects nature's particulars, much in the way that a camera lens exposes; and in the process illuminates… the "unrelieved, bare-faced, revelatory" facts.

"[citation needed] According to Amy Hungerford, the influence and use of the transparent eyeball in Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping is palpable.