American Philosophy (6 page)

In the following months I started cheating on my wife with a roomful of books. I made the trip to New Hampshire repeatedly. My wife and mother—in a unison that always infuriated me—demanded to know where I was going. I could have told the truth. Instead, I chose to lie, making up conferences that needed to be attended and friends I wanted to visit. Up until that point my life had been so routine, so scripted, so normal, so
good
—but my brief encounter with my dead father the previous year had brought that life to an unceremonious end. Nothing about life is normal. And nothing about life has to be good. It's completely up to the liver. The question—Is life worth living?—doesn't have a scripted, public answer. Each answer is excruciatingly personal and therefore, I thought, necessarily private. Ella Lyman Cabot, a close friend of Hocking's and one of the few women who took graduate courses in philosophy at Harvard under James and Royce, once wrote, “We live alone, thoughts that are deepest drawn / and purest in our inner consciousness / Abide undreamed by the common throng.” The thoughts I had at West Wind were mine, and mine alone. So I lied.

West Wind became my escape, but also my place of penance. Guilt and anxiety—the deep-seated Calvinist variety that have no particular object—kept me from eating and sleeping. Jennifer, who is one of the kindest women I've ever met, watched my steady decline into poor health and assured me that when I came to work on the books, I could have dinner with her and sleep in the warm farmhouse or in the less warm but still dry manor house. Instead, I skipped meals, hiked up to the grassy field behind the library, and pitched my tent. On the occasions I intentionally forgot the tent, I stretched out on the ground. I could say that this reflected my love of American philosophy, my desire to create a little bit of Thoreau's experience at Walden, to go “to the woods to live deliberately,” and all that. But the truth is that I wanted nothing more than to escape, to experience something well outside the ken of my anesthetic life. And a bit of self-destruction did the job nicely, at least for a time.

I got sick up in those hills in the cold spring dampness, and when summer rolled around, I picked up Lyme disease in the forests behind the Hocking house. Lyme is not unlike a failed marriage: Its onset is almost indiscernibly slow, so gradual that by the time you're diagnosed, you can hardly remember a time when you weren't terribly ill. In truth, many patients with Lyme can't remember a damn thing. Lyme encephalopathy is characterized by a dysfunction of the cerebral cortex, resulting in the “brain fog” of short- and long-term memory loss. I do remember my knees throbbing like hell. Most of my appendages tingled and eventually went numb. By the time I went for treatment, I was so dizzy and disoriented I had to do the unthinkable—ask my wife for help. She silently drove me to the Mass General ER, where a team of doctors diagnosed me with “a mild case of meningitis” and, after a few days in the hospital, sent me home with a massive dose of antibiotics. The cure for the disease, like the cure for most dying relationships, is even worse than the symptoms themselves. Twelve weeks of doxycycline—three months of diarrhea, nausea, blistering mouth, sun sensitivity, and more dizziness. Not that any of this stopped me from going up to the library. Eventually my wife discovered a credit card statement with a series of purchases from gas stations in New Hampshire, reamed me out for lying to her, and then offered to accompany me on any future trip. But I always found a way to politely keep her away from my escape.

*   *   *

One evening in late September, alone on a hill at West Wind, I began to think about Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The nineteenth-century feminist and author of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” an autobiographical tale of stifled and forgotten genius, Gilman routinely got cut out of the American philosophical canon. She was a serious writer at a time when serious writers were still not meant to be women. She abandoned her husband and a conventional New England life in 1888 and fled, with her daughter in tow, to Pasadena, California, where she began to make her name as a lecturer. At some point in the spring of 1891 she fell in what she would later call “really passionate love” with Adeline Knapp. This was not the sort of friendship you talked about in public. “I now,” Gilman wrote, “have some one to love me, and whom I love.” A year later Gilman did what few other women of her time dared—she got a divorce and sent her daughter back to be raised by her ex-husband. This sort of freedom looked, at least from the outside, like sheer madness. But to Gilman it made perfect sense—she'd fallen in love and wasn't about to talk herself out of it. And this seemed as good a reason as any to terminate formally a marriage that had probably already died. It was, by my estimation, the best decision of her rather difficult life.

At some point during that September night at West Wind I too decided to leave my spouse and finally admit that I was in love with another woman I hardly knew. The love was unrequited, but that scarcely mattered. My decision, free but apparently insane, made me feel even more guilty. But it also, at least for the time being, relieved the anxiety that had plagued me for more than a year. My father had walked out on us when I was four, and I was brought up by my truly exceptional mother, who gave me many things, among them a profound fear of divorce. In hindsight I know that this aversion was one of the few things holding my silently dismal marriage together. But when my father died, this semi-neurotic fear had died with him. From the outside, the marriage didn't look that bad, but as Thoreau once said, “lives of quiet desperation” rarely do. High in the New Hampshire mountains, the decision seemed reasonable enough, but as I headed for home at the end of the weekend, I began to doubt my resolve, so I made a Ulysses contract with myself that I couldn't break. At a pawnshop outside of Derry, I sold my wedding ring for $278, just enough money to buy the case of mediocre pinot noir that I needed to temporarily forget the whole ordeal. I never made it home that night, instead hightailing it back to the Hocking estate. The wind had picked up, so I decided, for the first time, to sleep in the library.

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 intriguing 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.