Page - 180 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

and history. Any instant, according to Emerson and his progeny, can transform the perceiver so as to help them see beyond established patterns of custom and habit. Exhilaration makes the familiar strange, instilling in the seer a vision of a new heaven and earth; heaven indeed has been realized in the seer’s eyes. Furthermore, all sense of one’s alienation from the world is removed at the mo- ment of unitive epiphany. Emerson himself attests to this, noting in Nature how he sensed an “occult relation” begin to abide between him and other beings, so powerful was his own experience of ecstatic reverie. “I am not alone and unacknowledged”, Emerson writes. The trees, the grass, and all other lifeforms constitutive of the biome “nod to me, and I to them”.23 Seen in this light, The Tree of Life’s conclusion can come to seem more like the sort of ecstatic revelation Emerson first promulgated in Nature than an at- testation to the truth of Christian eschatological orthodoxy. The film’s ending with Jack ambling among the grounds around his office building, as if in a daze, only bolsters the point – he might as well be crossing a bare New England com- mon. Jack’s epiphanic realization has opened his eyes. The very conditions of his union with the world, and, moreover, his and the world’s resulting transfor- 23 Emerson 1983, 11. Fig. 6–b: Outside, Jack delights in the renewal of his vision (Terrence Malick, US 2011), 02:12:05; 02:12:12. 180 | Russell C. Powell www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185