Here is an excerpt from an article written by William Zinsser for his Zinsser on Friday series featured by The American Scholar website. “The American Scholar is the venerable but lively quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932. In recent years the magazine has won four National Magazine Awards, the industry’s highest honor, and many of its essays and articles have been selected for the yearly Best American anthologies.

“Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous speech, “The American Scholar,” delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College in 1837, the magazine aspires to Emerson’s ideals of independent thinking, self-knowledge, and a commitment to the affairs of the world as well as to books, history, and science.”

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July is when America packs its kids into the car and goes looking for the sublime–even if nobody knows that’s what they’re looking for. I used to think “sublime” was a dumb word, a mushy rhyme found in every bad poem and bad song and bad hymn. But when I started writing about the great parks I learned that the word has a specific intellectual meaning.

I remember one July afternoon when I sat on a log in Yellowstone National Park, waiting for Old Faithful to go off. I had always assumed that the geyser erupts on a regular schedule–something like every 57 minutes. I should have known better. In Yellowstone, nature was still visibly at work, just below the surface. No geyser could be expected to be strictly punctual.

At the Old Faithful Inn, a rustic edifice that seemed to be made of giant Lincoln Logs, I saw a sign “predicting” the next eruption for 3:42–more than an hour away. It said that eruptions last anywhere from 1.5 minutes to 4 minutes, depending on shifts in the bubbling underworld, and can only be forecast one at a time. YOU TOO CAN PREDICT OLD FAITHFUL, said an adjacent mathematical table, which explained that in 1917 a ranger discovered “a correlation between the duration of an eruption and its subsequent interval.”

Walking out to Old Faithful at 3:30, I found several hundred pilgrims already there. I was struck by the simplicity of what we were waiting for. Americans are generally thought to be unable to enjoy themselves without electronic help. At the ballpark a scoreboard or an organist tells us when to cheer; on television a laugh track tells us when to laugh; in cars and on walks a digital companion saves us the trouble of having to look at the scenery or listen to the birds or think our own thoughts. But in Yellowstone we were waiting for a show whose only component was hot water. There was no impatience in the crowd; even small children seemed to know we had signed up for something you can’t buy at the mall.

At 3:42 Old Faithful went off and everybody clapped. The eruption lasted only a few minutes, but it had a beauty that no photograph could convey, the water rising and falling and catching the sun and then slowly drifting off. Afterward, the motorized tourists went back to their cars and buses and the rest of us went back to the hotel. But the geyser continued to tug at us in the lobby and the dining room. Whenever its next predicted moment approached we all stopped what we were doing and hurried out to watch. My own fidelity was rewarded by several eruptions of unusual length and height, including one in which the dancing waters were silhouetted against the setting sun.

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In my opinion, William Zinsser (author of On Writing Well and 17 other books) is the best single source for expert advice on how to write effectively. Zinsser on Friday is his weekly posting at The American Scholar website about writing, the arts, and popular culture based on a favorite quotation or comment.