“Men in the world of today are bugs.”

Depicting an eyeball in a dinner jacket and top hat standing in a landscape, this is the best known of C. P. Cranch’s series of very literal illustrations for Emerson’s Nature (ca. 1837–39). It was shrewd of Cranch to hone in on this baffling phrase. Eyeballs perceive transparency, but aren’t themselves transparent, so what did Emerson mean? Context helps, a bit. “Transparent eyeball” appears near the end of Nature’s first chapter, when Emerson is trying to describe precisely why walking in the woods has a curative effect.⁠ ⁠ “Standing on the bare ground,— my head bathed by the blithe air,— and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”⁠ ⁠ Bodily dissolution is key to these enchanted moments, except the body can’t entirely dissolve, because one part of the body — the eyes — induces the dissolution. “I am nothing; I see all” is the operational tangle that leads Emerson to the anachronistic “transparent eyeball”. Cranch’s illustrative figure is appropriately at odds with itself. Its posture is debonair, and its hands seem to have melted away, but its large eyeball-head, with barely the suggestion of a lid, stares upward, rapt and transfixed, as if communing directly with the sun.⁠