American Philosophy (9 page)

Sitting in my car that morning, I decided I never wanted to go back to the city. I'd follow Thoreau's lead and stay at West Wind. My life would become an experiment in Thoreauvian self-cultivation, a project that had always struck me as more manageable and realistic than trying to embody Emerson's “self-reliance.” I didn't need to be heroic, but could I become at least a slightly better person by avoiding the pettiness of everyday life? “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Thoreau instructed. “I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.” What exactly do people “make,” Thoreau asked, when they “make a living”? They make money; they spend money; they buy stuff; they waste stuff. Thoreau thought that they generally fritter away life.

American philosophy—from Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century straight through to Cornel West in this one—is about the possibilities of rebirth and renewal. “We must,” Thoreau insists, “learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep.” Thoreau's charge in
Walden
has been recast by so many American thinkers in so many different ways that I'd come to regard it as a type of wishful thinking, a reminder of how close to impossible it is to remain meaningfully awake to our lives. Living this way requires a kind of attentive optimism that I wasn't sure many of us were capable of anymore.

*   *   *

I pulled myself off the heated seats just as Jennifer appeared from behind the library. I must've been quite a sight. Unshaven, barefoot, still slightly blue from the cold. Jennifer didn't seem to notice, and she smiled broadly. I was grateful and did my best to return the gesture. She responded by giving me a hug. As a rule, philosophers don't hug. Most of us do this meaningless cheek kiss thing that is supposed to make us look sophisticated and European, or we just ignore each other altogether. Jennifer Wiley, the fifty-year-old granddaughter of Agnes Hocking, hugs. This was the best I'd felt in months.

“Let's have dinner at the lower farmhouse in a little while. I have something cooking down there.”

I nodded and said something that I hoped sounded vaguely impressive about what I planned to accomplish in the library meanwhile.

“Okay. Sounds good,” she said, turning to leave. “I'm going to scythe this afternoon.”

Suddenly the idea of helping Jennifer scythe felt vastly more important than working in the library, so I asked if she could use a hand.

Of course she didn't need one. Saviors like Jennifer and the man with the tire iron don't need assistance with the tasks of everyday life. They are self-sufficient all by themselves. But Jennifer heard the underlying plea and said, “Sure, that'd be great.”

This time I felt myself make a better show at smiling. Turning to the car, I must have gestured for her to get in.

“It's easier to walk,” she said matter-of-factly.

Thoreau wrote “Walking” in 1851. Over the next decade, he would lecture on this essay a dozen times, more than on any other. It was, by many accounts, his favorite. “Let me live where I will,” Thoreau writes, “on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness.” Once my shirt was back on and buttoned, Jennifer and I started off down the dirt road and I was struck by my sadly narrow understanding of West Wind. Fixated on worm-ridden books and obsessed with the prospect of finding dusty artifacts, I hadn't really taken the time to appreciate the landscape supporting the library.

Walking gives one many things, according to Thoreau, but one of its greatest gifts is time. In my pursuit of self-perfection, I'd taken up running in high school—long, fast, gut-wrenching sessions that left me nauseated for the rest of the day. Often I would run to the gym, tear my body apart with weights, and race home. On these outings there was never enough time; I was always behind the clock and racing to catch up. Thoreau's walking, an activity that seemed perfectly suited to Jennifer, served a very different purpose:

[T]he walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours—as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!

For Thoreau, walking is not something one has to do. It isn't a great test of will, but walking with care requires an attention to the present that is extremely difficult to maintain. Thoreau thought there was something sacred in walking, and he said that the best way to do it was to “saunter,” from the French
sainte terre
. The point of walking was to move in such a way as to make, or keep, the land holy. The destination was pointedly unimportant. Of course you had to decide where to go—or, better, how to go—but the point of walking was not to get anywhere in particular. The point, if one could call it that, was to experience the sublime in the mundane. And this experience, so common yet so rare, had intrinsic value, the sort of value that made a life worth living.

I looked across the valley to a distant hillside I'd never seen. Jennifer surveyed the hill carefully, as if each clearing had a role to play in some divine plan. “The deer sleep up there,” she explained. “You can see where they bed down when you walk around in the morning.” Jennifer was the one granddaughter who wasn't at all bookish. She deferred to her two sisters on matters of philosophy and never missed an opportunity to downplay her skill with words. She was quiet. I wondered what she thought about when she went walking. “Where do you walk, Jennifer?” I asked. She laughed. “Oh, all over. It doesn't matter.” She probably had her favorite jaunts, but she seemed like the type of person who could be at home anywhere, even—and perhaps most especially—mid-step. She knew what Thoreau called “the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.”

The dirt road took a hairpin turn around a stand of bare apple trees and opened out into a grassy field in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere was pretty damned beautiful. This, I thought, was why Robert Frost—who'd visited West Wind often—instructed us to take the road less traveled. I remembered Frost writing that he and William Ernest Hocking had been “thoughtful friends of long standing,” and I hoped I could one day say the same of Hocking's granddaughter.

The field stretched down the hill toward the tree line, framing an old white farmhouse with a pale green roof. Jennifer lived in this house all by herself. This year, she'd stay through the winter instead of moving back to Tamworth, a little town across the valley. She didn't mind the solitude. She ducked back into the barn that was connected to the house. I assumed she would emerge with heroic implements fitted to the epic task of scything that awaited us. The pile of firewood neatly stacked next to the front porch was shoulder height—more evidence of Jennifer's Thoreauvian husbandry. Thoreau never became a husband, in the usual sense of the word, but he maintained that husbandry—the simple act of tending one's own garden—was the proper alternative to a life of modern alienation. When he went to Walden, he knew that his retreat stood in marked contrast to the cultured existence that occupied so many other Harvard graduates: “Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome … and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry.” Husbandry. This term for farming comes from the Old Norse verb
búa
, which means “to dwell,” to be in one place, to make a home for oneself. “Ancient poetry and mythology,” Thoreau writes, “suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste … by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely.” Our present age understands husbandry much as it does walking: something that has to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible, as a means to get somewhere or something.

Looking around at the remains of a garden at the edge of the house, I was struck by the careful expertise that must have gone into it. I'd spent my first summer at West Wind glued to rare books, trying in vain to understand something essential that I'd missed in American philosophy. All the while, Jennifer had been down here chopping wood and gardening, enacting scenes from
Walden
. Sophistication was frequently overrated. What did I know about husbandry? For a second I thought about the woman who used to be my wife. We had finalized the divorce earlier that year, and at that very minute she and her new fiancé were on their way to a new home in a midwestern farming state in the heartland. She'd chosen a fighter pilot, which was, by my estimation, about as far as you could possibly get from a philosopher.

Once again, Jennifer saved me from my thoughts. “Are you ready?” she asked.

The scythe wasn't exactly what I was expecting. It looked a bit like a rake with a flimsy ax head—a dull and rickety thing with a loose, rusty blade. The pine handle, or “snath,” as it is known in scything circles, was about three feet long—far too short for me—and felt as if it would fall to pieces in my hands. I'd imagined something fearsome, or at least sturdy, something fit for Winslow Homer's
Veteran in a New Field
, a painting of a Civil War veteran mowing his way effortlessly through an endless stretch of golden wheat. Jennifer, however, was pretty pleased with the tool, and her scything tutorial made the work look easy. Relax, feet wide, knees bent, arms straight, pivot on the balls of the feet, and twist at the waist. Ideally, the blade just skims the ground, slicing through grass and soft plants without getting stuck in the dirt. I'd thrown discus in high school, and it seemed a little like that. But I was really bad at throwing discus and, it turned out, worse at scything. I couldn't seem to let go, to get my whole body into it. I muscled through using only my arms, which wore out in a matter of minutes. When I noticed how slowly I was going, I tightened my death grip, redoubled my efforts—again, only with my arms—and buried the blade two inches into the ground. Rocks were my greatest adversaries, and they were everywhere. The sound of steel striking granite rang through the hills at West Wind that afternoon. Jennifer just smiled and silently made her way through the meadow. As I hacked my way through the dirt, I took some comfort in knowing that Thoreau had faced his own troubles in tending the fields around Walden: “My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean.” Thoreau hated the nibbling beasts (making an exception to his vegetarianism to devour one). I gave my scythe a mighty Homeric sweep, and the blade fell off.

“You can't force it, John. Just work slowly.”

I bent over to pick up the blade. Jennifer was right, of course. Forcing things wasn't working out. I turned around to watch her carefully pivot through the grass. Nothing was rushed or hurried. She had nowhere else to be. But somehow she was still making good time. I turned back to my work. One “cannot be happy and strong,” Emerson informs his reader, “until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.” That woman was happy and strong. I'd always assumed that self-reliance was a matter of radical self
-assertion
—that it amounted to leaving one's current self behind in favor of some future, more compelling form, that it depended on one's ability to resist and deviate from one's surroundings. But Jennifer's movements suggested something quite different. Minutes later, hours later, I looked up again. She was still gliding and pivoting through the pasture, avoiding the thick patches that gave her trouble, revisiting them again from a new angle. And then she stopped.

“I need a break,” she confessed.

For the first time in my life I considered the possibility that the paragons of self-reliance might be those who know when they need a break. Doug Anderson, my first and most beloved philosophy teacher, had suggested something similar when I was still a student, but I'd not taken him seriously at the time. He'd been worried about my sanity and compulsiveness, and I'd assumed he was offering paternalistic advice veiled as a philosophical lesson. He told me that “Self-Reliance” was never to be read by itself, that Emerson had written a sister essay called “Compensation.” He suggested that I read the two in tandem. I did, but it didn't make sense to me. The two seemed diametrically opposed. In short, “Compensation” argues that no matter how hard you work, no matter how desperately you strive to free yourself from natural or societal constraints, you'll inevitably fail. Or at least eventually need a break. For the Emerson of “Compensation,” brazen self-assertion was, at best, counterproductive because it failed to recognize something basic about human nature—namely, that it was part of, rather than apart from, the workings of nature. Self-reliance, properly understood, was always situated, ever so carefully, in a wider cosmic order. “Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take.”

Jennifer and I settled on the front porch to survey our work. She explained that I'd just taken part in a Hocking family ritual. Every year the relatives—most of them academics from around the country—would make the pilgrimage to West Wind to do the season's haying. They no more had to come to West Wind than Thoreau had to go to Walden. They could've stayed in their offices at the University of Chicago or Harvard or wherever. But they came anyway. The adults would scythe, the teenagers would pitchfork the grass into piles, and the smaller kids would follow behind picking up the remains. I was taken back to Shelley's “West Wind,” the wind that blew the leaves as pestilence-stricken multitudes all over God's creation. The hay probably looked a little like that. Occasionally a child on the edge of her teenage years would try her hand at the pitchfork and someone would end up at the hospital, but for the most part everything went smoothly. Even to the untrained eye, this wasn't fertile land. Definitely not the sort one would seek out for the purpose of farming. It was rocky, arid stuff that was good for pine trees and not much else. The Hockings kept returning out of principle, or something even deeper than principle: desire for the experience.