by John Kaag
I felt Carol behind me. The Phaedrus is a crazy dialogue. The craziest. She peered over my shoulder long enough to read both pages and see a passage I’d obsessed over for nearly a year: “There is no truth to that story that when a lover is available you should give your favors to a man who doesn’t love you instead, because he is in control of himself and the lover has completely lost his head. That would have been a fine thing to say if madness were evil, plain and simple.”
“That’s not particularly Kantian,” she whispered. “Is it?”
* * *
Laocoön kept faithful watch over us as we made our way through Hocking’s shelves that afternoon, providing a constant reminder of the pains that attend dangerous truths. I knew the other version of the Laocoön story—where he was killed for having sex in a sacred place. With that thought, I forced myself to concentrate on the books.
The shelf packed with Plato was amazing. Hocking had ordered it chronologically, from the earliest dialogues, through the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proculus, to a curious group of seventeenth-century thinkers called the Cambridge Platonists. At the end of the shelf was a well-worn first edition of Samuel Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection from 1825. I looked at this collection more closely. Emerson had never grown tired of these thinkers, writing in 1850:
Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all these drift boulders were detached … every brisk young man who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation,—Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,—is some reader of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things.
Whosoever would be a Platonist must be a nonconformist. Being a follower of Plato meant never following anyone ever again. The philosopher Boethius was charged with treason in fourth-century Rome. There are a number of different accounts of his execution; he was either clubbed to death or chopped up in little pieces for conspiring against the Ostrogoths, who had taken control of the Roman Empire. The fifteenth-century French writer Rabelais fared a bit better, but only because he went into hiding to escape being condemned as a heretic for satirizing the Catholic Church. And then there was Coleridge. Rebel of rebels, hero of heroes, he occupied a special spot in my heart. Emerson loved him too—he had read Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection as a young man; this is where Emerson picked up his early interest in Plato and Plotinus. Coleridge’s Romantic interpretation of the ancients put the difference between Plato’s bold drama and Kant’s strict system into stark relief.
Coleridge—following a long line of Platonic thinkers—believed that Truth was realized through a sort of inner calling that granted each person partial access to the reality of the Divine. Every person could attend to this individual calling if he or she had the courage to take heed. For Coleridge, Socrates was courage personified; in the Apology, the Greek says that he pursues the Good and the True with the help of a daimonion—a “divine something”—that warned him against making bad decisions. Socrates listened to this daimon and therefore ended up living and dying nobly. The implication for Coleridge was clear: Those who fail to listen to the voices in their heads screw up royally. I knew all about these voices. One had warned me about getting engaged, and then about getting married, and then about staying married. If only I had taken its advice sooner. I’d watched Carol get married while my little daimon said all sorts of inappropriate things. My wife and I had traveled from Boston to Vancouver to hear my new colleague say her vows to another man. I’d forced myself to ignore the voice in my head, to lean over to my wife of the time and say in as convincing a voice as possible, “They’re going to be happy together.” I think I almost believed it at the time.
Listening to your daimon isn’t necessarily easy. Coleridge gave it a go as a young adult. He had great plans to start what he called a “pantisocracy,” a coed agrarian commune based on principles of equality, of which his daimon silently approved. With one of his Cambridge buddies, Robert Southey, Coleridge spent months laying the groundwork for a utopian community in the Susquehanna Valley, Pennsylvania. It would not be unlike the Transcendentalist commune that sprang up at Brook Farm, outside of Boston, in the 1840s. But Coleridge’s idea was more than a little insane—he had no experience farming and wouldn’t have survived a week on the eighteenth-century frontier. In preparation for the trip he married Sarah Fricker, the sister of Southey’s fiancée, in the belief that the foursome would form the core of their new community. On this point, his daimon screamed at him to stop, but he didn’t have the guts to listen. After the wedding, things quickly turned sour. Southey backed out of the pantisocracy, having decided that the simple life was untenable in the modern world. Coleridge’s idealism had led him to drop out of Cambridge to raise money for this egalitarian society, so he was left without a calling and with a wife he didn’t really care for. In a scathing letter to Southey he wrote, “You are lost to me, because you are lost to Virtue.” It was self-righteous anger born of the frustration of an ill-suited marriage.
I thought for a moment about Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” written months after his union to Fricker. Ostensibly it is a poem about an old captain whose ship is lost at sea, but it’s actually a thinly veiled tale of a dismal marriage. It’s no coincidence that the whole ghastly poem is told to a group on their way to a wedding party—it’s a warning about what can happen in such a union. The Mariner makes one really bad decision, and the winds change, set the ship off course, and then fail to blow at all. Motionless in the middle of nowhere:
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
Marriage can be something like this, and the albatross is always there, a sign of regret tied around one’s tired, scrawny neck.
Many say that divorce is too easy today, but most of these people have never tried it. In my experience it’s very difficult to shake the albatross. In Coleridge’s day it was next to impossible. When he eventually got around to listening to his daimon, it told him to jump ship, and quickly. He did. He left his wife, and European Romantic poetry was born.
“I have to get a little air,” I said, looking around to see where Carol was.
A voice answered from the middle of the library: “Okay, go on, I’ll join you in a bit.”
I grabbed a book, traversed the bookcase, and made my way toward the voice. She was hunched over a reading table that was stacked with dirty volumes, just underneath the portrait of Agnes Hocking. She looked up long enough for me to once again appreciate the uncanny resemblance, and she smiled and went back to work. I stepped out and took a long breath before wandering around the manor house through the uncut grass now covering nearly all of West Wind, and I looked down across the valley. At some point in the not-so-distant past the grassy stretch between the library and the mansion had been trimmed back so that the Hocking girls—now the Hocking women—could perform plays for the family on the lawn. I imagined a bunch of children assuming the roles of Shakespeare or Sophocles as their hyperintellectual parents directed the whole affair. A scene of human culture, performed by babes, set in the vast expanse of nature. Coleridge would’ve eaten it up with a spoon.
I walked across the back porch, laid my hands on the back of a rickety Adirondack chair, and watched the sun pass slowly overhead. My god, the light. It cast long, steady shadows down the hill. I searched for my own among the shapes but eventually gave up and turned my attention to Emerson. He met an aged Coleridge in the early 1830s; Emerson was in his late twenties and had escaped to Europe after the death of his first true love. Coleridge’s Platonism and Romanticism gave the young American hope. As Socrates suggests in t
he Phaedo and the Crito, our physical existence is not the be-all and end-all. We should tether our frail bodily lives to enduring ideals and hold fast, even if doing so means giving up life. These ideals—the Real, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—were to be understood through persistent reflection, the type of self-examination that Socrates believed made life worth living. At the beginning of Aids to Reflection, Coleridge states this clearly: “There is one art of which every man should master, the art of reflection.” Only through reflection and its product, self-knowledge, were self-determination and self-possession possible. But self-determination wasn’t just a matter of looking back on your actions and wishing that you’d paid closer attention to your daimon. For these Platonic thinkers it was more mystical, more mysterious. Reflection brought you into immediate contact with something beautifully transcendent.
I’d picked up a biography of Emerson—one of the very good ones—on my way out of the library. The author, Robert Richardson, knew Emerson inside and out. I sat down and paged through the biography slowly. Richardson had realized that Emersonian self-knowledge wasn’t the shallow self-help of the twenty-first century, the solipsistic quest of a neurotic culture, but rather an attempt to interrupt the neuroses of our society, to find oneself in nature, and to consider the possibility that, in Emerson’s words, “the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God.”
As young men, Emerson and James hoped with all their being that this was true. A generation later, Virginia Woolf summed up Emerson’s Romantic Platonism rather nicely: “[W]hat he did was to assert that he could not be rejected because he held the universe within him. Each man, by finding out what he feels, discovers the laws of the universe.” This might sound like a bit of megalomania, as if the only thing in the world that matters is how one feels. But Emerson’s message about nature and selfhood was equal parts empowering and humbling, restoring and effacing. As I sat in front of West Wind looking at the mountains in the afternoon’s shadow and light, it made sense. It came close to William James’s description of mystical experience as “a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God.” I sat perfectly quietly and listened. How did I feel? The question was a good one, which I’d not answered for a very long time. I found my answer when I looked over the ridge, to places where the trees had recently been clear-cut. New growth was already beginning to pop up, eking out a bit of life before the freezing temperatures set in.
Something strange happened to time at West Wind; it flew, or condensed, or simply vanished. I shook my head and pulled myself up from the Adirondack chair, shot a single glance at the sun, and blindly traced my way back to the library. Entering the library on a sunny afternoon was a bit like stepping into a dark, moist cave. Carol hadn’t budged an inch in the last hour. She was still bent over, head down, writing furiously. “Are you okay?” I asked, mimicking her intensely strained posture. “How about a break?”
“No, it’s okay. I want to finish this before dinner.”
I wanted to tell her that there was no way to “finish this before dinner.” In fact, I had the hunch that we’d never get our heads around West Wind. All you can do is pace yourself and enjoy the fact that there will always be something to do tomorrow.
“All right,” I said, “but let’s go to town in about an hour and have a drink.” She didn’t respond. I went and looked over her shoulder at the open title page: John Stuart Mill. On Liberty. London. 1859. First edition. I could now understand her concentration. This was a truly exceptional book. Along with Kant, Mill is one of the heroes of the liberal tradition. Unlike Kant, Mill was a thoroughgoing feminist who believed, like many American thinkers, that freedom was not simply a luxury for the chosen few.
I started to make some remark, but she told me to go back to my Plato.
It didn’t take me long to lose myself in the shelves again. There were more than enough little mysteries to keep me occupied. The collection at West Wind was full of books from the personal libraries of American intellectuals, but the collection of Neoplatonic philosophy was different. I pulled out a surprising volume: Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe from 1678. First edition. The provenance was not American, but British. I guessed that Hocking had sought it out or, more likely, stumbled across it on one of his many trips to Europe. Turning the little masterpiece over in my hands, I wasn’t sure that people would regard it as a collector’s item, but they should. Ralph Cudworth, born in 1617, was similar to Hocking in that he was a nearly famous philosopher. He was part of the interesting group of thinkers known as the Cambridge Platonists, who took over two colleges at the University of Cambridge in the seventeenth century. Cudworth joined his more famous colleague Henry More as a fellow at Christ’s College, which, along with Emmanuel College, was the stomping ground of the Puritans in Elizabethan times. I could draw some vague connection between the book and the formation of American thought, but making one between Cudworth and American philosophy was a bit harder. Christ’s College is a weird nook of a college. It houses the smartest students at the university, as it has for the last three centuries. I remembered wandering through a parlor of Christ’s while I was studying at Cambridge (I was at Magdalene, a much more average college—but I liked to walk around and pretend), where I spotted a portrait of one of Christ’s most illustrious students, Charles Darwin. Yes, this book must have had a rather strange history.
I stared down at the flyleaf: “T. H. Huxley,” scrawled in what struck me as the tight script of a thirty-year-old. Over time, I imagined that Thomas Huxley’s autograph loosened up a bit, as most of ours do, but it looked like whoever penned this signature was more than a little tightly wound. Huxley was the grandfather of Aldous Huxley, the author of the famous dystopian novel Brave New World, but he was more than just Aldous’s grandfather. In the 1860s he was nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog,” a name he came by honestly. He’d met Darwin in the early 1850s and was among the first to read On the Origin of Species when it came out in 1859. In November of that year he wrote to Darwin to express his adamant support:
As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite … I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse & misrepresentation which unless I greatly mistake is in store for you … And as to the curs which will bark & yelp—you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which … may stand you in good stead—I am sharpening up my claws & beak in readiness.
Huxley was a ruthless defender of Darwin. I’d like to have friends like that—the type who would “go to the Stake” for me. What I found somewhat baffling was Huxley’s willingness to defend Darwin while at the same time regularly and forcefully disagreeing with him. I couldn’t conceive of a relationship like that, but Huxley and Darwin both fought and loved each other quite effectively. Huxley thought that Darwin’s understanding of gradual evolution did not match up with the empirical evidence; he maintained that nature worked in leaps and bounds, through periods of evolutionary stasis followed by rapid spurts of growth. He also suggested that Darwin had downplayed the dangerous implications of his theory—namely, that all animals, including humans, had specific evolutionary histories. Darwin eventually got around to making this claim in The Descent of Man in 1871, but Huxley beat him to the punch by nearly a decade. In 1863 Huxley published Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature and became the first person in history to apply modern evolutionary theory to human beings.
I paged through the book. What was Darwin’s bulldog doing reading Neoplatonism? It was possible that Darwin himself paged through this very book too. Improbable, but this was a time for indulging the improbable.
“Are you ready for that drink?”
“Nearly ready,” I answered. I wanted to stay in the dimly lit library and figure out this little philosophical puzzle about Plato, Huxley, evolution, and American philosophy, but I wanted
to get that drink more. My eyes and legs told me it was time to go; we could come back tomorrow. It was a long weekend, and I was happy that we wouldn’t have to rush back to normal life. I thought Carol might want to go home after one night and was thrilled that I’d not completely alienated her in the last twenty-four hours. We picked up our belongings, packed the books, and headed for the door.
“Do you mind”—she paused, as if to acknowledge the strangeness of her request—“if we don’t sleep at the library tonight? I actually didn’t get much rest. Isn’t there a place with a bed around here where two people could sleep?”
Yes, there were a bunch of shady motels on Route 16. They had “sordid affair” written all over them—one small bed per room, rented by the hour. But there was a place—I thought it might be called the Brass Heart Inn—at the base of Chocorua. I was sure we could find a room with twin beds or two small rooms. More appropriate for traveling with a married woman.
“Okay,” I said, “no problem. But you have to promise me something.”
“Oh?”
“You have to promise to wake up early to climb the mountain with me.”
“Okay.” She smiled. “Deal.”
ON THE MOUNTAIN
“Carol—” I knocked at her door softly. “Carol, are you up?”
I waited for a good three minutes and then tried again in a forced whisper.
A little moan slipped under the door. “Seriously? The mountain? It’s still dark.”
I persisted, and after a few minutes the door creaked open. Carol, who is quite trim, emerged looking like the Michelin Man. She hadn’t packed a pillow, but she’d apparently remembered an ancient puffy coat from her years in Canada. One of the few things Carol hates more than losing an argument or looking unfashionable is being cold.
“Not a word, colleague. This coat is warmer than dignity.”