by John Kaag
I was attracted to philosophy for similar reasons. My father left us twice: first when I was four and then, permanently, when I was twenty-nine. I can hardly recall the day he first departed, but I still have a definite memory of my mother telling my brother and me that he wouldn’t be coming home. It was in our furniture-less playroom, adjacent to the garage, where my brother and I usually spent the evenings dancing to folk music, one of the few things that my parents, at the end of their marriage, both liked. A beige Berber rug—the kind that lasts forever—covered the floor. My mother sat us down, and I remember pushing my little fists into the rug to see the imprint it left on my knuckles. My mother and brother, neither of whom I’d ever seen cry, sat on the rug and wept. I watched them for several minutes, slightly confused but mostly just embarrassed, and then crept into the other room to watch cartoons. I could hear them from the other room, which seemed, even at the time, very far away. I turned up the volume, and eventually the crying and the afternoon faded away.
My mother was right: My father was gone. But his absence remained. I now understand that it eventually drove me to philosophy, to study the writings of men who worked at figuring everything out, who could tell me the meaning of life, who could help me make sense of my place in a difficult world. At least at first, to philosophize was to compensate for something, for someone, I’d lost. I was, unsurprisingly, drawn to the fathers of American philosophy, obsessing about the intimate details of their lives, hanging on their every word, hoping they would explain themselves and the world to me.
* * *
I adjusted my sleeping bag and peered out into the night. I’d done this before. In bed, with my erstwhile wife, I’d stared at absolutely nothing for hours, unable to sleep, unable to shake the problems that I blamed for my unhappiness. What if I became a real drunk? What if I sabotaged yet another relationship? What if I became a father or, more frighteningly, my father? For a moment I tried, once again, to problem solve, but then I remembered Marcel’s suggestion that this reaction to existential angst isn’t the appropriate, much less the only possible, response to our human condition. Framing the universe—and our estrangement from it—as a problem to be definitively solved has the unintended consequence of distracting us from our ongoing participation in what Marcel called the “mystery of being.” And this participation, according to him, is about the best we humans can hope for. “A mystery,” in Marcel’s words, “is a problem that encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question. Getting to Mars is a problem. Falling in love is a mystery.”
I was so busy with my problems that I almost didn’t notice the faint light beginning to creep up from the East. On an intellectual level I knew lots of things about the moon—that it actually didn’t give off light, that it moved very quickly, that it came up in the East and set in the West—but I’d never truly experienced it before. I’d just have to wait a few more minutes and the upper pasture would be bathed in light. As the moon rose, I thought it would take care of the darkness, but it simply let me see it more clearly. Long, strange shadows—the kind that weren’t supposed to be cast at night—pitched down the hillside and quivered in the breeze. This wasn’t some deus ex machina that would save me from my situation; it was one of those Walpurgis Nachts that do nothing to solve our discrete, often petty problems but to cast them in the proper light. Little woodland creatures—satyrs, fairies, angels, werewolves—scurried about in the thicket behind us.
James described his night in Panther Gorge, surrounded by spirits and thoughts of Pauline Goldmark, with such romantic flair, but I’d be shocked if he wasn’t a little overwhelmed by the dark. James’s mentor, Peirce, might have been right that the “world lived and moved and had its BEING in a logic of events,” but that night on a hillside in New Hampshire convinced me that it was not the sort of logic humans could ever fully master. It wasn’t supposed to be mastered at all. It was supposed to be experienced. We play a role in the living and moving and being, and we are free to participate, but never simply as we see fit.
In June 1904 Hocking wrote to James to thank him for a course Hocking had attended on the concept of “pure experience.” Hocking had learned many lessons that term, “one of these … [being the] lively sense of how big the truth is, and how little any philosophy which flourishes its solution in a few formulae is able to do it justice.” Defining the whole truth of experience was much like describing this moon: perfectly impossible. “There is nothing more paralyzing,” in Hocking’s words to James, “than an even remotely adequate sense of the complexity of the truth.”
I lay motionless on the grass. Somewhere in the last hour I’d given up on the thought of sleeping and become lost in questions about how I’d come to this hill above the Hocking library. I remembered Whitehead’s comment, borrowed from Plato: “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.” Wonder remains the origin, animating force, and ultimate end of philosophy. It is what keeps us, intellectually and spiritually, on the move. In 1951 Marcel wrote Homo Viator (Man, the Wanderer). Royce, whom Marcel deeply admired, would have been happy with the traditional Christian connotation of “Man, the Pilgrim,” but it still chafed me. I’d stick to the wandering, though not aimlessly. My own attempts to describe the journey to myself seemed incomplete, and were aptly explained by Marcel in The Mystery of Being:
Consider what happens when we tell our friends the very simplest story, the story, say, of some journey we have made. The story of a journey is told by someone who has made the journey, from beginning to end, and who inevitably sees his earlier experiences during the journey as coloured by his later experiences. For our final impression of what the journey turned out to be like cannot but react on our memories of our first impression of what the journey was going to be like. But when we were actually making the journey, or rather beginning to make it, these first impressions were, on the contrary, held quivering like a compass needle by our anxious expectations of everything that was still to come.
I was, like the rest of these shadows, quivering. And had been for a long time. I tried to stop, to control myself, to put my thoughts and memories in order: Buffalo, Holden Chapel, James, trespassing, prison ships, leaping, falling, willing, love, gray eyes, Agnes, Carol. It was no use. It had been, and still was, one monstrous quiver. I took a deep breath and held it as the night continued to move in its perfectly inexplicable way.
Freedom and love. For Marcel, those were the two quintessential mysteries of the human condition. At the end of The Mystery of Being, he concludes that the point of life is not to figure them out, but to remain open to them, in touch with them despite their utter perplexity. “Man can touch,” according to Marcel, “more than he can grasp.” I pulled a blanket around Carol’s shoulders and settled in next to her. In the months before their marriage, Hocking had written to Agnes, “[Y]ou are with me nearly always. How incredible it all is. I spend most of my time trying to realize it—and giving it up.”
Dante’s Divine Comedy ends in a similar way. At the end of his epic journey through hell and purgatory and paradise, he finally arrives at the Empyrean, the everlasting abode of God. When I first read the poem, I thought that I’d done so to get some concrete answers about divine love and freedom. The Empyrean was the place where all this reading was supposed to pay off. At the time, I’d been deeply disappointed. In the last stanzas of the poem Dante tries to understand how the highest spheres of heaven fit together. Because they really must, after all, fit together, but he doesn’t have the words to articulate their majesty. Dante looks up at the divine orb that lights the sky, tries to explain it, and finally concludes that such a venture “is not a flight for these wings.” A decade ago I’d thought that the whole point of Dante’s journey was to reach the end. But there was no definitive ending:
The will roll’d onward, like a wheel
In even motion, by the Love impell’d,
That moves the sun in heav’n
and all the stars.
It is the best ending one can hope for. Freedom and love. Perhaps not to have and to hold, but rolling onward.
* * *
We were married in the fall of 2011, and Carol got pregnant on our honeymoon. “Are you a man entitled to wish for a child?” Friedrich Nietzsche asks. “Are you the victorious one, the self-conqueror, the commander of your senses, the master of your virtues?… Or is it the animal and need that speak out of your wish? Or loneliness? Or lack of peace with yourself?” Or, one wants to add, all of the above? As fathers, we’re expected to be “self-conquerors,” to have ourselves fully in order before we start giving directions to children. That might be a reasonable expectation, but one that nobody seems able to meet. After my time at West Wind, I expected that parenting, like falling in love, meant never again having yourself in perfect order, but facing the mysteries of intimacy as best you can. As a young child, I had feared my father, and years later, I feared becoming him. But in the end, he helped me learn very important lessons about being a parent—and about being alive. He taught me that William James was probably right about the meaning of life: It is up to the liver.
As we waited for our daughter, Becca, to arrive, the Hockings decided to donate part of the library to the University of Massachusetts Lowell. On the day we were to move the books, Carol was still enduring the trials of the first trimester, and she decided to stay home. So I picked up a U-Haul with my buddy Mark, and we slowly clunked up the hill to the library. The Hocking sisters met us in the driveway, and we made a last pass through the first floor before caravanning out to North Conway Dry Storage. Jill was excited: The thought of the books being used by real, live philosophers was thrilling to a woman who could have easily been one herself. Jennifer was relieved: She’d never felt at ease with the books, and a small part of her, I think, was happy to see them go. Penny wept. The books were the heart and soul of this place and—although they had to be preserved—their removal would destroy an essential part of West Wind.
Mark drove the U-Haul, and I hopped into Jennifer’s beat-up Saturn along with her sisters. As we pulled out of the driveway and made our way over to the storage locker to load the books, I asked the question that had bothered me from the start:
“Why was this place called West Wind?”
Penny reassured me that my guess about the Shelley poem was a decent one—“Ode to the West Wind,” the destroyer and preserver. I hunkered down in the backseat to consider the strange paradox of the poem:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Penny cleared her throat in the front seat. She wasn’t finished. She’d just paused to think.
“I could be wrong,” she said, “but I also think it was the nickname of my grandmother, Agnes. They used to call her West Wind.”
EPILOGUE: THE CULT OF THE DEAD
Today, a few hundred of the Hocking books, the ones the appraiser managed to assess in his two-day visit to West Wind, are kept in a room in the archives of the O’Leary Library at UMass. It’s pretty isolated, but at least it’s dry, warm, and rodent-free. I visit them often, under fluorescent lights. Occasionally I take my students. It is not exactly Houghton Library: There are no watchful librarians or even proper tables, just shelves and books. My students don’t seem to mind. In fact, they seem to like the cramped and understated intimacy of packing themselves between the shelves. At one point I made them wear gloves, but eventually I decided that any book that survived at West Wind could probably be handled with bare hands. I just tell them to be careful, and they are. I still think of the books at West Wind as I first found them—priceless but vulnerable, a bit like life itself.
* * *
If you enter Sever Gate on the east side of Harvard Yard and walk toward Holden Chapel, you’ll notice a boxy building to your left, which houses the philosophy department. This is Emerson Hall, named after that sage of Concord. On the second floor you’ll find the department office and Robbins Library. Reginald Robbins was a student of James and Royce. At the back of Robbins Library is a broom closet that doubles as a little-used storage space. In the midst of finding West Wind, I’d found this broom closet. It was filled with cleaning supplies, no small amount of dust, and the single most moving piece of writing I’ve ever read. At one point someone had been similarly moved, and had decided to frame it, but in subsequent years the frame had been wedged between the waste bin and the file cabinet. I’d pried it out far enough to see the words written on the bottom of the now-yellowing piece of paper inside the frame:
“Last written words of Josiah Royce…”
I pulled the frame out of its hiding place, and I couldn’t help thinking how ironic it was that Royce’s dying words ended up in a janitor’s closet and Hocking’s had been buried at West Wind, both signs that philosophy had taken an unfortunate turn away from the existential problems that these philosophers had found so compelling: how to live a creative, meaningful life in the face of our inevitable demise. As I read the scribbled writing inside the picture frame, I wasn’t surprised to see Royce attempting to cope with the tragic one last time in his final hours. Royce’s penmanship declined in his later life, and by his final year, 1916, it was almost illegible. But this note was surprisingly clear and deliberate:
Among the motives that have made the religious life of humanity intense, endlessly disposed to renew its youth despite all its disillusionments and unfailingly precious despite all of its changes and disappointments is the motive expressed in one of the oldest and newest of cults—the cult of the dead …
This rivals my first encounter with West Wind as the most haunting moment I’ve ever had as a philosopher. But it’s also one of the most profound. I knew what Royce was talking about, at least intellectually. The “cult of the dead” was a reference to a very old institution that sought to memorialize and counteract the tragedy of human finitude. It’s sometimes referred to as the “ancestor cult,” in which members spend their lives working to keep the dead alive, at least in memory. The ancient Celts had one, the Egyptians too. Royce hoped that such a cult could survive the forward-looking tendencies of modernity. Hocking had created a monument to this cult at West Wind.
If the ultimate tragedy of life can be summed up in Ecclesiastes’s suggestion that “all is vanity,” it was the job of the cult of the dead to respectfully, enduringly disagree. The cult commemorated the dead and spoke for them long after they were gone. It affirmed what most of us wish someone would say about us when we die: that we are still relevant, that we still matter.
On that afternoon in the broom closet, I wiped off the dust obscuring the rest of Royce’s words:
This cult has survived countless changes of opinion. It will survive countless transformations of belief such as the future may have in store for us. Its spirit will grow … So long as love and memory and record and monument keep the thought of our dead near to our lives and hearts, so long as … the spirit of brotherhood enables us to prize what we owe to those who have lived and died for us, the cult of the dead will be an unfailing source to us of new and genuinely religious life.
As I sat on the floor of the closet, cleaning the rest of the frame and thinking about the library at West Wind, it could have been easy to think that Royce had been dead wrong. We die, and despite the heroism of our final words, our remains end up at West Wind or in some hidden closet, wedged between a trash can and a file cabinet. All of this is true, but I now have some sense of how sacred these last remains can be.
West Wind taught me many things. About longevity in the face of destruction, about dealing with loss, about love and freedom, but also about the discipline of philosophy. Philosophy, and the humanities more generally, once served as an effective cult of the dead—documenting, explaining, and revitalizing the
meaning and value of human pursuits. It tried to figure out how to preserve what is noble and most worthy about us. At its best, philosophy tried to explain why our lives, so fragile and ephemeral, might have lasting significance. In Hocking’s words in The Meaning of Immortality, we must learn to “treat the present moment as if it were engaged in business allotted to it by that total life which stretches indefinitely beyond.” Royce’s son Stephen had written an inscription at the bottom of his father’s note: “Last written words of Josiah Royce found on his desk after his death never completed.” Never completed. At least that is the hope—when it comes to both the cult of the dead and philosophy’s dying words.
* * *
In 1850 John Hayward published a collection of sketches from his time at Harvard entitled College Scenes. One of these scenes is of a darkly lit room filled with skeletons and a couple of young pranksters with lanterns. One student holds the light while the other tries to make love to a corpse. At the bottom of the sketch, a shaky hand had scrawled, “A Midnight Foray into the Medical Room at Holden Chapel.”
When William James addressed his audience at Holden in 1895 to wrestle with the question “Is Life Worth Living?” he was undoubtedly aware of the macabre “forays” that had transpired beneath his feet (pictures from the 1890s show what look like human ribs stolen from anatomy labs and hung from the mantels of student dormitory rooms). Holden was renovated a century later, at which point the construction crew unearthed a dry well filled with human remains—after the college students were finished with their necrophilic pranks, the bones had been pitched down the hole and forgotten.