American Philosophy (8 page)

In the Hocking attic, someone had tucked news clippings between the Whitman volumes, and they documented, with surprising clarity, the relationship between their acclaimed relative and his still more famous friend. O'Reilly had made daily visits to the poet's Boston study as Whitman finished his final edits. Whitman welcomed his guest and admired—nay, envied—the Irishman's brave escape and flight to the New World. To Whitman, it sounded romantic.

I picked up a book from a pile next to the O'Reilly shelf—a volume from Horace Traubel's
With Walt Whitman in Camden.
Traubel had been Whitman's literary executor, a professional role that was equal parts respectful and parasitic. After Whitman died, Traubel documented in excruciating detail the conversations they'd had in the poet's final years. This had immortalized Whitman and earned Traubel a modicum of notoriety. I flipped to his account of a conversation he had with Whitman in the late 1880s. Traubel explained that “something or other induced me to mention John Boyle O'Reilly. This started W. [Whitman] right off”:

“Oh! He is not the typical Irishman: rather Spanish: poetic, ardent … You know his life in outline: he has given me glimpses into it: short, sharp, pathetic look-ins … They were like this: it was in his prison days: the prisoners suffered from bad food or too little food or something: O'Reilly is deputed to present a complaint: he does it: the overseer does not answer—pays no attention whatever: raises his hand, this way”—W. indicates it—“hits Boyle—slaps him in the mouth—violently—staggers him or knocks him over … What must that have meant to O'Reilly? he was a mere boy … O'Reilly has had a memorable life: this is but a sample item: he is full of similar dramatic introspections.”

Dramatic introspections? The American poet made oppression and incarceration sound like a campfire story. Whitman, along with Emerson and Thoreau, is often praised for his simple, even harsh language, for the way he entreats his readers to return to the hard core of human experience, for his insistence, in the words of Thoreau, on “sucking the very marrow out of life.” But maybe Whitman couldn't stomach O'Reilly's story without sugarcoating it, without making it more uplifting than it actually must have been. It is possible that O'Reilly liked being idealized in this way—maybe it was easier than recalling his previous life's reality—but maybe he secretly hated it. I hadn't read much of O'Reilly's poetry, but something of “The Dreamer” had stuck with me. I searched through the shelf to find it:

I am sick of the showy seeming

Of a life that is half a lie;

Of the faces lined with scheming

In the throng that hurries by.

From the sleepless thought's endeavour

I would go where the children play;

For a dreamer lives forever

And a thinker dies in a day.

I had no real idea when he wrote this, but I now imagined it was right after recounting one of his “dramatic introspections.” O'Reilly had given Whitman a theatrical story that the poet could embellish to his heart's content, but the Irishman alone was left with the memory of its brutality.

The distance from Boston to Bunbury, Australia, was 11,566 miles. In 1867, after his sentencing by the British courts, a young O'Reilly had boarded the
Hougoumont
, an English prison ship bound for Western Australia, and slowly made his way to Bunbury. When he escaped two years later, it was largely under his own power—from Bunbury to a little town called Dardanup, to Java, to Mauritius, to the British colony of Saint Helena, to Liverpool, to Philadelphia, and finally to Boston. This is the stuff of Transcendentalist glory: a perfect case of self-reliance. At every turn, authorities attempted to recapture O'Reilly, to return him to a life of servitude, to punish him for his participation in the Fenian uprising against British rule. This Irishman knew concretely what Emerson only conjectured in theory, that “for nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.”

Many philosophers and writers admire this sort of individualism but want no part of it. One of the great myths of American philosophy tells us that when Thoreau was thrown into prison for protesting the Mexican-American War, Emerson came to visit him, shocked that his young friend was behind bars. “Henry,” Emerson asked, “what are you doing in there?” According to legend, Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is, what are you doing out there?” Emerson held that protesting an isolated event or trend was pointless without a full-scale spiritual reform of society, but this seemed an obvious philosophical cop-out to Thoreau, who, like O'Reilly, was loath to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. This conversation probably never occurred, but it is emblematic of the dynamic between Whitman and O'Reilly: Whitman admired the convict's daring escape but failed to fully grasp the political realities that might cause one to be imprisoned. In response to O'Reilly's support of Irish political rule in the 1880s, Whitman chided him for being “too concerned about the Irish vote,” failing to realize that the mere act of voting was associated with a personal and national ordeal that most white nineteenth-century American thinkers could scarcely imagine. O'Reilly was painfully aware of the censure and physical punishment used to suppress insurrection, a pain made all the more acute by the intellectuals who failed to understand his most intimate commitments.

I flipped to Traubel's account of the early 1890s to see if Whitman had any wisdom to share about O'Reilly's death. Here was Whitman at his romantic best—or, as the case may be, worst: “I have not got over it yet—it was a startling story! And such a fellow! What the handsome light and shadow of the man! He had the fine port, the dark hair and eyes—of the Irish-Spanish mixture he was. When I looked at him I never wondered again why it was said to the credit of Ireland that it had come of Spain, or a thick Spanish mixture. Insomnia ‘a strange freak.'”

“Strange freak” indeed. The very things one wants to escape in sleep are the very things that keep the insomniac awake. Sleeplessness had always been my most dependable nightly companion—a bedfellow intent on replaying my day's failures into the wee hours of the morning. But I'd never come out and asked for a sleeping pill, which would have been abhorrent in my family. O'Reilly was the head of a similar family. His wife suffered from what was called “nervous prostration,” a common diagnosis for morbidly unhappy women of the nineteenth century. Chloral hydrate was prescribed to calm her nerves and make sure she slept reasonably well. Her husband hated that she had to take this sort of palliative for a mind that was supposed to be clear and constant.

I continued to sift through the clippings and eventually found an obituary from August 10, 1890: “John Boyle O'Reilly, editor of the
Pilot
, died at an early hour this morning at his summer cottage, at Hall, from an overdose of chloral. He was suffering from insomnia and took the dose to produce sleep.” This put an end to my snooping for the evening; I was done. But I'd read enough to ensure that I wouldn't sleep a wink. The reporter had done his homework carefully, describing the way O'Reilly's wife, Mary, had found her husband sleeping soundly at the living room window, his head in his hands, looking out to sea. When she wasn't able to rouse him, she called the doctors, who managed to coax out his last words: “wife's medicine.” Then he died. I wished the reporter had overlooked some of the details. It would've been easier to think that John Boyle O'Reilly had died of heart failure (which is what many Boston papers reported in the days following his death).

I scrambled out of the eaves, my headlamp-dominion bobbing wildly out of control. As I pulled the cord, the attic fell into darkness. On my way down the ladder I twisted my ankle, pitching headlong onto the large chesterfield at the bottom, clipping my elbow on its arm. This is when I decided it was time to forget the day. There was a bottle of bourbon in the trunk of my car. I never drank in the library (it seemed sacrilegious), so I sat on the lip of my hatchback and finished the bottle. Then I grabbed an armful of dirty laundry that had accumulated in my backseat and returned to the library. Dumping these clothes on the floor in front of one of the enormous fireplaces, I pulled the cleanest shirt from the heap, stuffed everything else inside the shirt, and tied the arms together. I stretched out on the chesterfield with my makeshift pillow. At some point during the night I managed to sleep, despite dreams of self-reliance and chloral hydrate.

 

WALDEN AND FROZEN LAKES

I opened my eyes. Slowly they focused in on the white lettering next to my head:
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
. It was a shirt I'd been given during my year as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. The American Academy sits on a small wooded corner of Cambridge next to the Divinity School, called Norton Woods, and for many years has been the temporary residence of a few lucky academics called the “Visiting Scholars”—recently minted Ph.D.s from across the country who are paid what seemed to me at the time an exorbitant sum to spend the year reading and writing. The academy was originally set up to create a space for academic scholarship in the New World, as an institution to rival the Royal Society in London. This was the place where American intellectual life was to take root.

My eyes shifted beyond the white lettering and caught sight of what looked like little clumps of dirt on my makeshift pillow. Then I realized it was rodent droppings, and I remembered that mouse shit carries hantavirus. Just what I needed: respiratory disease and kidney failure. Grabbing a bar of soap from my duffel, I sprinted off across the back meadow behind the library. By the time I got to the pond, my shirt and pants were already off. I'd totally forgotten that this was someone else's property and that it was October in New Hampshire. The water quickly reminded me of the latter. The word “bracing” isn't quite right. I was a good swimmer, but not in this weather. Still, I dove in deeper and let the frozen lake do its work. As a kid, I'd fallen through the ice on my neighborhood skating pond. It wasn't fatally deep, but I remembered being stuck waist-deep and trying to claw my way out, only to break more of the ice. It was the closest thing to hell I'd ever experienced. Interestingly, the deepest pits of Dante's
Inferno
are not hot, but unearthly cold. Evil incarnate is trapped hip-deep in the frozen lake of Cocytus, which was only slightly colder than a pond in New Hampshire on the brink of winter. Soon the water began to feel almost comfortable, which was my cue to get out. I looked across the pond and finished washing out my mouth. On some level, I knew my behavior was absurd. The pond water I was swallowing would give me giardia before it inoculated me against the hantavirus I might have inhaled the night before.

Thoreau had similar moments of crisis in his self-made hut on the banks of Walden Pond. He had the good sense not to write them all down, but a few made their way to me in my studies of American philosophy: “What am I at present? A diseased bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf that still hangs shivering on its stem. A more miserable object one could not well imagine.” This was from January 1843, two years before he made his three-mile relocation from Concord to Walden. There were undoubtedly high-minded reasons why he went to the woods, but there were also some simple ones that I had an easier time identifying with. Thoreau was widely reported to be physically repulsive. Louisa May Alcott joked to Emerson that Thoreau's demeanor “will most assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man's virtue in perpetuity.” Nathaniel Hawthorne was even more straightforward: Thoreau “is ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed.” Maybe Thoreau went to Walden to escape, to grow his neck beard in peace.

I pulled my shriveled body out of the water and, looking down, ardently hoped that Jennifer and her daughter, Joanna, hadn't decided to go for a midmorning walk close by. I pulled on pants (just in case), hobbled back up the hill, and got into my car to enjoy the heated seats.

As I thawed, I puzzled over Thoreau's self-loathing. Surely he had the imagination and the perspective to know that an untold number of people led much more miserable lives than he. Thoreau never had to face starvation and beatings on a prison ship. His were the problems of privilege, the neurotic difficulties one faces when absolutely nothing is really wrong, the abiding anguish that afflicts those even in a world of heated seats. Thoreau lived at the beginning of such a world and embodied the strange dissatisfaction that would quietly, secretly come to define it. The problem wasn't that life was hard, but that it had become too easy. People, and not just royalty, at long last had free time and therefore had to figure out the best way to use it. This freedom of choice caused them no end of anxiety. One could choose so many things! Just that week I'd walked thirty reluctant undergrads through Viktor Frankl's
Man's Search for Meaning
and tried to explain what Frankl meant by the “existential vacuum”—the infinite array of possibilities that we first worlders have the chance to explore. At first the students thought the vacuum sounded pretty cool.

“John,” asked one excited fellow, “you mean I can do whatever I want?”

“Yes, that's right. Anything.”

He grinned.

“But that also means you are solely responsible for your choices. Totally, utterly, inconsolably alone in deciding what to choose.”

The grin faded. Modernity has no shortage of things designed to distract us from our own angst: small talk and Facebook and college classes and dates and holiday get-togethers and jobs and money and marriage and
stuff
. This is just the way civilized life hums along. For many people, it works with such seamless precision that its machinations seem not only convenient but completely necessary. Of course, very little is necessary, and Thoreau knew this. He had a hunch that frenetic busyness should not be the business of human life, that chatter makes one feel horribly alone, that well-paid jobs are different from “callings.” And that long relationships are not necessarily synonymous with meaningful ones. (He never married.)