American Philosophy

by John Kaag

  The night was objectively terrifying: pitch-black (despite my father’s misguided efforts when I was a child, I’ve only recently mastered my fear of the dark), the sounds of scampering paws in the walls, Dorian Gray–style portraits looming above. The rodents and ghosts could have me, I thought. I couldn’t see how they could make my life any worse than it already was. I listened to the growing storm outside and, oddly, for the first time, pondered the meaning of “West Wind.” It might have something to do with Pearl S. Buck, who had called her first novel East Wind: West Wind. I imagined Buck owning a similar manor house closer to the coast and naming it East Wind as a subtle testament to her unspeakably close friendship with Hocking. But the timing didn’t make sense, given that Hocking and Buck became lovers only in the twilight of their lives. Plus, I couldn’t imagine the Hocking family house being named for another woman. So I decided that West Wind probably referred to the famous poem by Percy Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind.”

  O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

  Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

  Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

  Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

  Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

  Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

  The leaves whispered across the roof. There were even more inside—“pestilence-stricken multitudes” bound with brittle spines and thin covers. The library would get cold again that winter, and most of the books—the ones we hadn’t already saved in dry storage—would freeze. What a hopeless poem. What a hopeless place.

  On Monday, back at work, a colleague, a gray-eyed woman named Carol Hay, whose office was directly across the hall, asked how my trip had been. She was the one and only person I actually wanted to tell. But I lied and told her it had been terrific.

  FRAUD AND SELF-RELIANCE

  On a dreary morning in October I stood in the rain on the muddy shoulder of Route 16, reciting lines from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” which struck me as more than a little self-righteous. My Subaru was jacked up on a flimsy-looking mechanism I’d just used for the first time. Anyone could change a tire—except me.

  “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

  Emerson could go fuck himself.

  My tire iron was stuck in the mud about a dozen yards from the car—exactly where I’d thrown it. The bolts on the flat tire had been screwed on by a pneumatic wrench. How was a mere mortal like me supposed to get them off? I’d always fancied myself as having the type of wiry strength Emerson would have respected. I’d spent my time at school swimming, rowing, running, and generally trying to prove that I was someone worthy of the fathers of American philosophy—I’d taken its underlying story of rugged individualism to heart. But now a few tight bolts had forced me to question my role in this story. I looked down at my wet hands. They were red and blistered from my failed attempts to loosen the bolts. The pain in my hands told me to use my foot. Of course the goddamned tire iron just bent. And then broke. And then was thrown as far as possible.

  The thing about Emerson is that you tend to remember him at the least opportune times: “A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.” My flat tire wasn’t ephemeral and titular. I was. The self upon whom I was supposed to rely couldn’t even fix its own car. I called AAA, a service my mother had wisely purchased for me. AAA called a local mechanic, who called his assistant, who slowly made his way to the breakdown lane of Route 16.

  I shook hands with my savior in some feeble attempt to make us equals. His hand was tough and thick and told me he’d saved many, many people before. My hand probably told him that I was a philosopher suffering from Lyme.

  “You can’t force it. You just need to apply some steady pressure,” he said, loosening the last bolt with an effortless twist.

  “What do I owe you?” I asked.

  “No worries, man. It’s covered.”

  I dug through my pockets and came up with a handful of waterlogged bills, which I insisted on giving to him—my salvation had to be worth something—and then I slowly drove the rest of the way to West Wind. Emerson was quite emphatic on this point: “I say to you, you must save yourself…” Yet that did not seem to be in my power.

  By then I’d been visiting New Hampshire regularly for more than a year. Things were going much better with the cataloging than they were at home in Boston. When I finally hit Route 113 and turned for the library, I’d cooled off a little. I didn’t actually hate Emerson: I admired him to the point of envy. He, like James, was well acquainted with personal loss. He had married his first and most ardent love, Ellen Louisa Tucker, but she died just five years into their relationship. Emerson was crushed, and he pined after her for the rest of his life, preserving the memory of a twenty-something girl who’d contracted tuberculosis. “The mourner reads his loss in every utensil of his house, in every garment, in the face of every friend,” Emerson wrote. “The dead do not return.”

  But they also never fully leave. Emerson went to Ellen’s tomb daily for months. On March 29, 1832, he wrote exactly one sentence in his journal: “I visited Ellen’s tomb and opened the coffin.” But after a time, Emerson pulled himself together and got on with life. By 1835 he was happily remarried, and in the next decade he was able to deliver “The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance”—forward-looking, often ebullient lectures that set the tone for classical American philosophy.

  Emerson instructs his reader to be actively, freely engaged in life when faced with hardship—unencumbered by the past that threatens to haunt it. I’d begun to read Emerson when my older brother, Matt—whom I idolized—brought home a collection of his essays from university. My stubborn fourteen-year-old self found the essays both cool by association and inaccessible enough that I just had to crack them. I never did “crack them” in the sense of fully figuring them out, but I ended up opening them again and again for the glimmers of clarity they would occasionally yield. Over time, I came to realize that this was the point of reading Emerson and, for that matter, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller and all the rest of them. The reason to read the American Transcendentalists wasn’t to hang on to their every word, but to be inspired by them. This early American philosophy was about inspiration, about moving beyond the inert and deadening ways of the past.

  * * *

  When I got to the library that day, it was already late afternoon, and as it was fall in New Hampshire, it was almost dark. There were now working lights on most of the first floor—an odd mix of original Tiffany lamps and bare lightbulbs hanging from rafters. With the Hockings’ blessing, I’d spent many evenings on the first floor, cataloging such treasures as the volume that now sat on the reading table next to the fireplace. I’d plucked it from the shelves the previous week but hadn’t had a chance to take a close look. It was bound in what’s known in the antiquarian business as “three-quarter calf,” a slick-looking leather binding that’s still used to restore valuable books. It looked so new and shiny that I’d almost missed it the first time around. The archive-worthy materials at West Wind could usually be evaluated by the amount of weathering they showed, but this time that filtering method had led me astray.

  I sat down on one of the Stickleys, opened the marbled board to the first page, and looked at the inscription: “Henry Lee, Esq. With the author’s regards. December 1875.” The handwriting was shaky but easily recognizable. In Emerson’s later life his mind slowly left him, but he’d managed to hold on to his handwriting for the most part. I flipped to the next page: Letters and Social Aims. 1875. First edition. This was a neat little book, though far from Emerson’s best. In fact, many people claimed it was his worst. Some even thought that he wasn’t the primary author, suggesting that his literary executor, James Elliot Cabot, had created a sort of “Frankenbook,” revising and piecing together Emerson’s unpublished essays for the volume. For me, what was intr
iguing about this particular book wasn’t so much its content, but the path it might have taken to West Wind. There were a number of possible scenarios I could conjure, all of which underscored the interesting and generally forgotten fact that American philosophy often emerged from the most pivotal moments of American history.

  The Emersons and Lees went way back—so far back that their long-standing relationship was forged during the American Revolution. It’s impossible to understand American philosophy without grasping how it sprang from this conflict. Emerson’s grandfather, William, had built the Old Manse in Concord in 1769, a building that now commemorates the first battle of the Revolution. He’d been the chaplain of the Provincial Congress when it met in Concord in 1774, and then he took up the post of chaplain for the Continental Army when the war began. When he died from camp fever while on campaign, Emerson’s father, also a William, was a boy of only seven.

  Lee’s revolutionary roots were even more distinguished. He could trace his family back to Anne Hutchinson and John Cotton. Hutchinson was the Puritan woman who dared to contradict the Puritan ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. Cotton was the minister who inspired her to do so. The freethinking Hutchinson was fed up with her Puritan leaders’ draconian work ethic. The settlers no longer had to be strictly obedient to the British crown, but in those early years the Puritans demanded ever-greater obedience from their followers. Hutchinson was tired of taking orders. Inspired by Cotton’s sermons, she argued publicly that salvation could not be achieved through good works alone but turned on the acceptance of grace, a personal conversion that had absolutely nothing to do with the church hierarchy of the Puritans. She was exiled for her belief—truly radical in her day—that religious salvation came hand in hand with political and personal freedom. Her ideas percolated through the next five generations of American thinkers. Many years after Hutchinson’s death, one of her descendants gave birth to Henry Lee’s grandfather, Joseph. By this point the Lee family was no longer terribly interested in ideological or theological matters. Their revolution was to be fought not over the Bible, but over economics and politics. Joseph Lee’s family was one of the most powerful shipping clans in America at a time when the British colonial taxes were particularly onerous. On December 16, 1773, Joseph and several hundred of his most zealous buddies decided to dump English tea into Boston Harbor. When the Boston Tea Party led to the Revolution, Lee allowed his merchant ships to be recommissioned as privateering vessels, and the Beverly Privateers of the American Revolution were born.

  What must it have been like to have ancestors like this? More than a little intimidating, I imagined. The unspoken goal for nineteenth-century American thinkers was to live up to their families’ revolutionary spirit. No small trick, considering the relative peace and stability that existed in the early 1800s. In the 1830s Emerson and Lee, each in his own way, decided to rebel against the one American institution that hadn’t undergone radical transformation in the previous century—Harvard. Harvard hadn’t changed with the Revolution; it was dominated first by a bunch of old-school Calvinists and then by a surprisingly conservative group of Unitarians. Both groups staunchly disapproved of the liberal Unitarianism that had begun to gather momentum. Echoing his ancestors’ rejection of institutionalized religion, Emerson argued that salvation could be achieved through intuition of the divine in nature. He was a proper adult when this debate began, and he made a well-respected career of his iconoclasm. Lee was an improper teenager at the time and resorted to other methods of protest.

  Lee entered Harvard at the age of sixteen in 1834. Back then, the college wasn’t an altogether reputable place. The students terrorized unsuspecting tutors and partied hard, and Lee was no exception. In his first year, his class of freshmen initiated what has come to be known as the Harvard Rebellion of 1834. One day, a Greek tutor by the name of Dunkin asked a freshman, John Bayard Maxwell, to recite his lesson. The pupil refused and was suspended for insubordination. In response, his classmates set Dunkin’s room on fire. Things escalated from there. The president of Harvard was burned in effigy, guards were badly beaten, and tutors, all of them, were physically intimidated. Amid the chaos, Lee bolted one of his tutors into his bedroom—screwing the door closed from the outside, making it impossible for the tutor to escape. For this relatively harmless prank Lee was suspended and exiled to the manor house of Ezra Ripley, the minister in the nearby town of Waltham.

  This is where Emerson and Lee first met, at the home of Ezra Ripley. An odd fellow, Ripley was respected by the traditional members of the Harvard community, but unlike most of them, he welcomed debate between conservative and liberal thinkers. Emerson was thirty-four when the young Lee was “sentenced” to Waltham, and they met during one of Emerson’s visits. Their interaction was fleeting at the time, but Emerson came to see Lee as more than an average hooligan. In the next three years Emerson would write and then deliver two of the most critical lectures on the failures of Harvard and, by extension, the failures of the American educational system: “The American Scholar” and the “Divinity School Address.” In these lectures he poetically gave voice to the general sentiment of Lee’s class of 1834: American education and religion needed to leave the dogmatism of the past behind and tailor their lessons to the promise and innovation of young minds.

  “The American Scholar,” delivered in 1837, was at first widely admired. “We will walk on our own feet,” Emerson promised, “we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds … A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.” Anne Hutchinson would have been proud. Equal parts egalitarian and progressive, “The American Scholar” was just reverent enough to keep from alienating the stuffy Harvardites. But the “Divinity School Address” was another matter. Given in the summer of 1838, the lecture pulled no punches regarding the role of church hierarchy in pursuing salvation—saying it had none. At the outset, Emerson said, “Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.” For the Harvard overseers, this was blasphemy, and they proclaimed that Emerson would never again give a lecture on college grounds. The proclamation almost held: He wasn’t invited back for thirty-two years. Only in 1870 was he asked to give the University Lectures that initiated graduate studies at Harvard. And who welcomed him back? The onetime hooligan Henry Lee.

  Lee remained a troublemaker, but he had become famous during the Civil War for organizing Union troops in Boston when President Lincoln called for the defense of Washington in 1861. With this reputation and ample family funds, he was invited to serve on the Harvard Board of Overseers in 1867; he accepted and held the post until 1879. He oversaw the construction of Memorial Hall, the massive High Victorian Gothic building at the center of campus, and supported the organization of the University Lectures, which included a very grateful Emerson and a young philosophical upstart named Peirce. Just days before the elderly Emerson returned to lecture at Harvard, he was invited to James Elliot Cabot’s Brookline home, where Henry Lee’s children were putting on a play of Alice in Wonderland.

  How had Lee’s copy of Letters and Social Aims gotten to West Wind? Emerson probably gave Lee the book in 1875, and when Lee died, in 1905, his family probably gave the book to Richard Cabot (James Cabot’s son). Richard Cabot and William Ernest Hocking had taken Royce’s classes together in the 1890s and become best friends. In fact, Richard Cabot introduced William to Agnes O’Reilly, whom he would later marry. Cabot was the namesake and godfather of Hocking’s son, Richard—Jill, Penny, and Jennifer’s father and the most recent owner of West Wind. So when Richard Cabot died in the 1930s, the book became part of Hocking’s time capsule. Looking back, I had the realization that at one point in the not-so-distant past, philosophy wasn’t the sort of thing that was discussed only at formal conferences and in arcane journals. It was exchanged over dinner, between
families. It was the stuff of everyday life.

  The more time I spent on the Hocking estate, the more it seemed that all roads in American philosophy converged at West Wind. Yet looking around the library, it was impossible not to feel utterly alone. Nobody cared about this circuitous history. Nobody cared anymore about self-reliance or about the possibility that philosophers could also be political or existential heroes. Philosophy was no longer intensely personal.

  Emerson and the rest of his cohort encouraged their readers to face the unavoidable tragedies of life with Promethean fortitude. After my disaster with the tire iron, to say nothing of the seeming tragedy of the rest of my life, I thought all of this was a pipe dream. Life was tragic—they’d gotten that much right—and on a few rare evenings, ensconced in a first-floor nook with Hocking’s notebooks on idealism, bathed in the warm glow of the Tiffanies, I’d almost bought into their just-so story about self-reliance and salvation. This wouldn’t be one of those evenings. Instead, I pulled myself up from the rocker, slunked across the library, looked up to pay my respects to the portrait of Agnes, and went directly upstairs.

  * * *

  In the attic, I pulled the cord on the one overhead bulb, which turned out to be wholly insufficient for snooping. So I fished out my headlamp from my pocket and worked my way back into the eaves, where Penny Hocking had spent many a summer day. There, her mother, Katherine, had assiduously stored box after box of family correspondence, many of the letters written in the early nineteenth century from such places as Chicago, Albuquerque, and San Francisco—parts of the country that were, at the time, frontiers. I had some vague idea that these rivaled the books for being the most valuable part of the library, at least monetarily speaking, but I wasn’t an antique collector or that sort of history buff, and these letters were deeply personal for the current generation of Hockings. So I avoided them. I didn’t want to trespass any more than I already had.