“Something Peculiar” in Concord

When Henry David Thoreau died in 1862, Ellery Channing, his walking companion and

first biographer, asked questions about him that resonant more clearly than any replies to them

then did or have since been able to:

I have never been able to understand what he meant by his life. Why did he care

so much about being a writer? Why did he pay so much attention to his own

thoughts? Why was he so dissatisfied with everybody else, etc.? Why was he so

much interested in the river and the woods and the sky, etc.? Something peculiar,

I judge.

I judge not. The “something peculiar” here is the misprision of like minds. Leaving aside the fact

that writers are outliers if not counting errors in any reliable statistical sampling of human

population over that past 5,000 years, and writers of marked genius statistically insignificant,

Channing’s aporia was common in Concord between 1830 and 1860. There, writers mistook and

baffled each other daily. Thoreau had answered all of Channing’s questions more than once in

twenty years of writing, yet Channing names not one of his friend’s publications as at least

circumstantial evidence of the reasons, motives, intentions, and causes of his friend’s behavior.

What Thoreau meant by his life, for example. That’s easy: he “wished to live deliberately, to

front only the essential facts of life,” etc. Walden alone answers Channing’s one implicit and his

four explicit questions several times over, here sharply, there coyly, and in other places, even

tediously. Channing had the man and his books, plus the journal, unpublished at Thoreau’s death,

that he must have known his friend kept; and yet he behaves in this passage as if the writing

didn’t exist, only “the writer” and his excessive “care” to be one. That gone, Channing, a

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published author of poems himself, is at a loss to understand Thoreau—the same Channing who

by the letter from which the next sentence comes helped decide Thoreau for Walden: “I see

nothing for you on this earth but that field which I once christened ‘Briars’; go out upon that,

build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no

alternative, no other hope for you.”

“The grand process of devouring yourself alive”: here may be the clue to Channing’s

peculiarity, with which most people have more in common than they have with Thoreau’s, and

so also to his aporia, as Harold Bloom might call it, his inability to read his friend with

understanding. By “the grand process of devouring yourself alive,” I take Channing to mean

writing. Channing makes no mention of Thoreau’s writing because, for Channing, writing may

have meant no more than playing video games does to some of us. It may have meant no more to

him—again, even though he was a writer—than Emerson’s “speculations” meant to the sculptor

Horatio Greenough, who called them “masturbation.” They simply didn’t add up, count. It was

as though all Thoreau had done was walk in the woods, over and over again. Channing had been

there, done that. In fact, as Franklin Sanborn, a slighter younger contemporary, pointed out,

Channing had “preceded” Thoreau in Concord sauntering, in wood-cabin living, and in Cape

Cod. He had done so, according to Sanborn, because Channing was “less bound by those strict

habits of study which were native to Thoreau all his life.” “Strict habits of study” were alien to

Ellery Channing. He was what we might now call a “slacker.” “Whim, thy name is Channing,”

wrote Bronson Alcott, who was widely known for having schemed, projected, moved, and

ventured his family into a debt that only the success of his daughter’s Little Women could, after

twenty years, retire. Living was the thing for Channing, not writing, and if his contemporaries

saw him as an “idler,” that meant nothing to him, no more than did Thoreau’s calling his poetic

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style “sublimo-slipshod.”

There was nothing “slipshod” about Thoreau’s life, and there is nothing slipshod about

his writing. In many ways, then, Ellery Channing’s life is a more accurate type and model of the

life Thoreau’s has been mistaken for by people such as Christopher McCandless, the subject of

Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. But there’s no strictly written representation of Ellery Channing’s

life by Ellery Channing or anyone else. He was too busy to write it. And, because what writing

he did do is “slipshod,” nobody has taken the trouble to re-invent it. It’s salutary to recall now

and then that writers are writing when they write, not doing the things they’re writing about, and

that readers are reading when they read, not doing the things they’re reading about. What writers

are doing when they’re not writing is hard to discover, but it seems safe to say that Ellery

Channing was not writing more often than he was writing, while Thoreau was probably writing

more often than he was not writing. The Henry Miller of American nature couldn’t have been

doing as much deliberate living as his friend Channing was—unless by “living deliberately” he

meant writing—just as Henry Miller wasn’t doing as much fucking as his books would seem to

indicate he was; otherwise, no books, even though, as he tells Warren Beatty in Reds, “there was

a lot of fucking going on.” We know Thoreau, that is, because of his books, though we may have

known of him for other things he did, by way of other books; we don’t know of Ellery Channing

because of his books; and if we do, chances are it’s his biography of Thoreau (which may be a

self-portrait to some degree) we know, and not his poetry collection.

Even so, Channing’s attitude toward writing published and unpublished was not unusual

in Concord; Thoreau himself gives it vent. The Concord writers—of whom Thoreau, Emerson,

Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott are only the most widely known—tended to see their

writings as superfluous, extravagant productions, by-products, “performances,” to use Emerson’s

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preferred term. They may have used themselves up in writing, yet they discounted the texts they

left behind them (they were as leavings) long before they were extant publications—as knowing,

perhaps, how the books they themselves read, studied, annotated, and wrote about had come into

the world. Here today, there tomorrow. But so what? Thoreau could no more give a theory of

Thoreau than Shakespeare, as Emerson said, could of Shakespeare. They were absorbed in and

by “doing their thing,” but the fact of that absorption, or what Emerson called “abandonment,”

was not one of Thoreau’s essentials, Channing seems to be telling himself. Thoreau, on the other

hand, seems to have been telling himself that deliberation is essential, along with confrontation,

suction, sturdiness, routing, cutting, shaving, driving, reducing, and, at last, publication “to the

world.” From Walden, then, one of the most deliberate, curious, and open statements of purpose

in our language:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts

of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to

discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor

did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and

suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that

was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it

to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine

meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by

experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Apart from “publish” and “give a true account,” the only verbs that refer unambiguously to

writing and writing, Thoreau’s diction here might actually be said to agree with Channing in

thinking that doing something in order to write a book about having done it raises more questions

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than it answers.

But “something peculiar”? If “to live deliberately” means “to live to write and publish,”

then yes, Thoreau is something peculiar, even to a like-minded fellow writer. (On a wider view, a

sample doesn’t need to be very large—1,000 randomly selected citizens?—to give an accurate

statistical representation of the paucity of publishing writers in a given population.) Channing is

accurate in another sense, too. Not making the mistake, as writers in the act of writing about

writers frequently make, of seeing writers everywhere, he takes the view of writers that most

people take: What good are they? What have they done? Why are they so self-involved? All that

writing for—for this? It doesn’t add up; be as charitable as you please: it doesn’t count.

Thoreau could be a soldier, be a haymaker, be a drover, be a calculator; instead, he wants to

make an “excursion” in which he acts like one and all? And in doing so, Channing has his

answers, even if he didn’t think so.

The view of writers that most people take was well-known to the Concord writers, as

Hawthorne’s “Custom-House” preface to The Scarlet Letter makes clear. Their writing—

Emerson’s and Thoreau’s in particular—makes little sense, I think, apart from that context.

Thoreau identifies his purpose with the purposes and actions of those who would readily be

credited with doing useful, wage-earning work. But perhaps he also hoped that his readers would

see what he was up to so that they might register both his dissatisfaction with their complaisance

and his objection to their view of him as “a writer”; that is, as what we might call “a non-

contributing member of society.” He wants his readers to know that conducting one’s life

deliberately and deeply in order “to see” life for what it is constitutes an experiment—the

controlling metaphor of the whole passage, as I read it—of the most practical and therefore

settling kind. And it is work, work as hard as that done by those, as we hear today, who “defend

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our freedom” and “grow our food.” Thoreau means once and for all to bring a lot of idle talk and

argument and speculation to an end by resolving a fundamental, if not the fundamental, question:

“Is life worth living or not?” But Thoreau doesn’t begin Walden with a philosophical question so

easily parsed (“experience” teaches us that life is both “mean” and “sublime”), even by his most

pious readers. He begins with “Economy,” the longest chapter in the book, one of the densest

chapters of nonfiction in our literature, and one it’s a safe bet to say Christopher McCandless is

not the only reader in 150 years to have skimmed. (I doubt that Channing skimmed it, but his

Thoreau is “the Poet-Naturalist,” not the Naturalist-Economist some in the field of

environmental literature field are now reading him as.) Here, he says, he will answer the “very

particular inquiries” of his “townspeople,” inquiries “which some would call impertinent” but

which he calls “very natural and pertinent.” So much for Thoreau as a man concerned only with

his own thoughts. He knew his audience well; after all, he was no hermit, and his nearest

neighbor lived only a mile away—a long distance to us, but not to a man who might walk twenty

miles in a day, as Thoreau and Emerson did, but walked daily in any case.

I imagine that one of those who might have considered the “very particular inquiries” of

Thoreau’s fellow citizens “impertinent” was Emerson. He confined his responses to those

inquiries to his journals. When he did revise what he’d written there for inclusion in his essays,

he most often left out names and circumstances. But Emerson may have considered Thoreau

himself impertinent, and have had no greater understanding of him all along or in the end than

Channing did. Emerson was certainly not above feeling that he had “preceded” Thoreau in

writing as Channing had preceded him in living. On the fundamental question of whether life

was mean or sublime, Emerson had not pretended that the matter was open. In 1841, he went on

record in his essay on “The Over-Soul”: “We grant that human life is mean; but how did we find

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out that it was mean?” I hear in this sentence an echo of Genesis, 3:11: “Who told you that you

were naked?” For Emerson, we find out that life is mean by experience: we eat, to borrow from

Simone Weil, what we should only look at, contemplate. That we do eat, he says in “The Over-

Soul,” makes “the appeal to experience . . . for ever invalid and vain.” I read Walden as

Thoreau’s answer to Emerson, his attempt to demonstrate that the appeal to experience is valid

and replete, and that by way of it he can show that life (not only Emerson’s “human life”) is

sublime—but not that he can then or therefore “conceive extraordinary hopes of man,” as

Emerson felt he could by appealing instead to “faith.”

But rather than set Thoreau and Emerson in opposition (again), I want to read them as

another pair of liked-minded, fellow-feeling Concord writers who misplaced each other’s

concreteness (Emerson was a careful naturalist), were subject to the narcissism of minor

differences (Thoreau is a superb rhetorician), and were joined in a triangular desire, the third

member of which was writing (both Emerson and Thoreau had “strict habits of study” all their

life). “Something peculiar”? I judge not, at least in regard to Concord between 1830 and 1860.

The Concord writers of this “age of reform,” as some historians have called it, could be

described, in our vocabulary, as co-dependent, passive-aggressive, grandiose, insecure,

defensive, neurotic control freaks. But I prefer Emerson’s terms for himself and his friends: they

had “a savage rudeness”; they were “extortionate critics”; they were “exacting children”; they

were “victims of expression”; they were “terrible friends.” Each of them did to one degree or

another what Emerson’s Aunt Mary Moody demanded of everyone alike: “Scorn trifles, lift your

aims: do what you are afraid to do.” Most of the time, their doing took the form of speaking,

reading, and writing. Emerson writes, his wife writes, his children write; Thoreau writes, his

mother and sisters write; Alcott writes, her father and mother write, her two sisters write;

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Hawthorne writes, his wife, son, and daughter write; Margaret Fuller writes—and Channing

writes, wondering why Thoreau cares so much about being a writer. Apart from its writers,

Concord, Massachusetts is famous for three things: The Battle of Concord, where “the shot heard

round the world” was fired on April 19, 1775; the Concord grape, developed by Ephraim Bull;

and Walden Pond. Walden Pond is still only two miles from the center of Concord, and the

center of Concord still only eighteen miles from Boston. The adjective “sprawling,” which

appeared next to the noun “suburb” in a recent New York Times article about Walden Pond, adds

nothing but scale to the fact: Concord with its 1,800 citizens was as much a suburb of Boston in

1845 as it is today, with ten times as many people.

One of the reasons Emerson gave for having settled in Concord in 1835 was that he

wished “to use” Boston. So Thoreau “used” Walden—not to get away from Concord, but to get a

purchase on it; and he used Concord to get a purchase on Walden. When Thoreau left Walden,

after two years and two months, he said grandly that he became “a sojourner in civilized life

again.” In fact, during his stay in the woods, Thoreau sojourned into “civilized life” almost every

day—to eat meals cooked by his mother and sisters, collect his mail from the post office, and

visit his friends. But this was not a secret that biographers later dug up and told. Thoreau himself

tells us in Walden. “How people should regard Thoreau as a hermit on account of his little stay

here I cannot guess,” wrote John Muir in 1893, on his pilgrimage to Walden Pond. Muir could

make the same comment today: in three recent (1997) New York Times articles, Thoreau is still

regarded as a hermit in retreat at Walden Pond. We may as well concede the point and move on:

the myth of Thoreau is more satisfying than the record of Thoreau, who spent seven years in

Concord writing up his two years at Walden Pond. The record includes the following facts.

When Thoreau took up residence in what would become one of the more famous places in

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America (30,000 visitors annually by World War I; 500,000 alone in the late 1970s), he was only

about two miles from where he’d been the day before; he’d been visiting Walden daily for years;

Emerson owned the land Thoreau built on, and had himself, the year before, wished to build “a

cabin or a turret there high in the treetops,” where he could spend his days and nights “in the

midst of a beauty which never fades for me.” We seem to need Thoreau to have gotten away

from it all, alone: for one thing, it saves the trouble of doing likewise. Simplicity is a costly

proposition. The legend of Concord–Walden is more efficient and practical, and much less

expensive, than the life it promises.

The Concord side of the legend is also exaggerated or inaccurate or both. Concord’s

writers are to have lived in “complete withdrawal from the busy life of the community.” Yet for

ten years, Emerson acted as a one-man Chamber of Commerce, coaxing writers and thinkers

like Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott to come and live in Concord. The Apostle of Self-

Reliance paid the debts of his friends, subsidized their rent, raised money to send them on

lecture tours at home and abroad, and defrayed the costs of publishing their manuscripts. He

hosted meetings, arranged lectures for visiting authors, opened his house on Sundays for

Concord children, made rooms available to friends for extended visits, and made his friends

available to the citizens of Concord for conversation. He delivered addresses on the history of

Concord and on the anniversaries of the Battle of Concord. Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and

Thoreau publicly defended abolitionists, harbored and guided fugitive slaves on the

Underground Railroad, protested the treatment of Indians, and supported (with the exception

of Thoreau) the movement for women’s rights. Thoreau was undoubtedly beneficial to his

community through his temp work as “a Schoolmaster—a private Tutor, a Surveyor—a

Gardener, a Farmer—a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a

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Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster.” He spent a night in

jail for refusing to pay his poll tax, and he spoke courageously in defense of John Brown after

Brown and his men raided Harpers Ferry in 1859. As for Hawthorne, who stayed in the Brook

Farm utopia for eight months in 1841, the charge of living in isolation from his community

would have struck him as ironic: most citizens live this way most of the time, if they can. This

was the point Hawthorne made when he left Brook Farm for Concord, saying that he could

“best attain the higher ends” of his life “by retaining the ordinary relation to society.” Like

Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne was not averse to satire, to “troping,” as Richard Poirier

would say, some of the words—like “higher” and “ordinary”—that his community lived by. Nor

did the Concord writers somehow escape the visitations of lust and love. Henry James wrote

that “passions, alternations, affairs, adventures had absolutely no part” in their lives. James

exaggerated. Still, readers who look for rising action and dramatic conflict in the Concord

writers will, on the whole, be disappointed; Henry James was. Five years after Emerson’s death

in 1882, James wrote that the Sage of Concord “led for nearly eighty years a life in which the

sequence of events had little of the rapidity, or the complexity, that a spectator loves.” The lives

that most of us lead, most of the time, are as undramatic as Concord itself was between 1830

and 1860. But there is complexity and rapidity outside of dramatic events, and the scale of our

passions, alternations, affairs, and adventures need not be grand—Lewis and Clark in the

Louisiana Purchase, Christopher McCandless in the Alaskan wilderness, or Jon Krakauer on

Mount Everest—to be consequential.

Louisa May Alcott, for example, worried that she’d exposed herself in her first novel,

with its Emersonian title, Moods, which begins with an epigraph from Emerson (a passage from

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“Experience” beginning, “Life is a train of moods”) and contains the first fictional treatment of

Thoreau. “I felt very much afraid that I’d ventured too much & should be sorry for it. But

Emerson says [and here she quotes from “Self-Reliance”] ‘that which is true for your own

private heart is true for others,’ so I wrote from my own life & experience & hope it may suit

some one & at least do no harm.” I don’t know if Emerson read the novel, published in 1864,

but I bring it up here neither to talk about it nor about “Self-Reliance.” Instead, I want to close

by looking at Emerson’s beginnings as a writer, at the sources in his “life & experience” of that

essay Alcott quotes to encourage herself as her first novel is published. I see the fact of Alcott’s

Moods as a fitting, proportionate consequence of the most famous Concord writer’s most

consequential essay, and I see her, in making just that response, accurately interpreting

Emerson and Thoreau as writers—rather than as philosophers, environmentalists, or

ideologues. Emerson, in particular, has been disfigured by his praisers and detractors alike in

the past thirty years. His friends in the academy have all but conceded to his critics there the

affirmative, celebratory, gung-ho Emerson, of Nature and “Self-Reliance,” and decamped to

later and somewhat grayer essays, like “Experience” and “Fate,” in order to advance a home-

grown pragmatism against a perceived Europhilia. Both camps are talking over his head and

reading him tendentiously—but it’s hard, as Juvenal said, not to write satire.

I want, at any rate, to discount backward and inflate forward, as economists do one or

the other or both of when comparing buying powers of a unit of currency in different decades. I

turn to the earliest Emerson to inflate toward us the working man, the deliberate writer, and to

discount away from us the transcendental Sage of Concord, the one critics like Kenneth Lynn,

Irving Howe, Myra Jehlen, and Wai-Chee Dimock have sternly and ingeniously put a premium

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on as the “cryptic slave” of a predatory American capitalism, as if Emerson were the original of

Milton Friedman & Company’s “shock doctrine,” as anatomized by Naomi Klein.

In 1820, at the age of seventeen, in his last year at Harvard, and ten months after he

began keeping it, Emerson wrote in his journal:

Different mortals improve resources of happiness which are entirely different. This I find

more apparent in the familiar instances obvious at college recitations. My more

fortunate neighbors exult in the display of mathematical study, while I after feeling the

humiliating sense of dependence & inferiority which like the goading soul-sickening

sense of extreme poverty, palsies effort, esteem myself abundantly compensated, if

with my pen, I can marshal whole catalogues of nouns & verbs, to express to the life the

imbecility I felt.

The passage already indicates the strength of Emerson’s leading aim in life: to “improve” his

“resources of happiness.” Writing will be his means of doing so. His raw materials will be his

feelings—of humiliation, inferiority, imbecility. He will pay himself in the coin of expression,

“whole catalogues of nouns & verbs.” He will be self-employed. Twenty-one years later, in

1841, he will publish the essay by which he is still chiefly known—if he is known. “Self-

Reliance” is a return on Emerson’s long-term investment. From the alloy of humiliation and

poverty, he has forged the steel of his happiness: “the Napoleon temperament.” He writes in his

journal on May 1, 1838:

The advantage of the Napoleon temperament, impassive, unimpressible by others,

is a signal convenience over this tender one which every aunt & schoolgirl can

daunt & tether. This weakness be sure is merely cutaneous, & the sufferer gets his

revenge by the sharpened observation that belongs to such sympathetic fibre. As

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 even in college I was already content to be “screwed” in the recitation room, if, on

my return, I could accurately paint the fact in my youthful Journal.

The passage of 1838 repeats and varies that of 1820. Revenge and painting replace

compensation and expression; the economic metaphor gives way to the artistic, though the latter

was implicit in the phrase “to express to the life,” rendered here as “accurately paint.” In both

cases, the journal is the business, and Emerson is reinvesting his profits in it. In both cases, too,

the life Emerson leads—the life of feeling—is the work, and writing the means by which that

passivity is processed into “happiness,” now more modestly called “convenience.” Where most

workers are “content to be screwed” for the sake of the paycheck, Emerson is content to be

screwed for the sake of the Journal, the “savings bank” from which he has been drawing the

funds for his essays. His best writing, as in the opening of the late essay called “Fate,” preserves

the antagonism between his “sympathetic fibre” (daunted and tethered by his Aunt Mary, or by

Louisa May Alcott, then a schoolgirl) and the apathetic fiber of “the Napoleon temperament.” He

never forgets that “a man must have aunts & cousins, must buy carrots and turnips, must have

barn & woodshed, must go to market & to the blacksmith’s shop, must saunter & sleep & be

inferior & silly.” A day after writing that in his journal, he wrote this: “Sometimes I am the organ

of the Holy Ghost & sometimes of a vixen petulance.”

In the effort to “improve resources for happiness,” Emerson takes revenge on what makes

him unhappy. And what made him suffer most, it appears, was to be silenced. The experience of

being unable to speak when cornered is common enough, and so is the experience of finding the

words later, when they’re no longer timely. But most people, having failed to find the right

words at the right time, let go and forget soon enough; they don’t make a habit of repeating the

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experience in a journal. But then, most people don’t think of writing as a form of expression—

still less as compensation, or revenge, for being unable to speak well on demand. And yet most

of us solve the problem in our daily lives in the same practical way Emerson did: by avoiding

situations likely to dumbfound us. Emerson did not lecture extemporaneously; he read from

prepared texts. Nor was he known as a great talker or a great conversationalist. But his style is a

spoken style; we hear him talking when we read him. He talks in a recitation room of his own

devising, and we enter in the midst of an ongoing examination. “We are here,” he writes in “The

Uses of Great Men,” “to put our own interpretations on things and to put our own things for

interpretation.” In this predicament, he can be dogmatic, absolute, hyperbolic, litigious, and

peremptory—in short, difficult to read.

The central mood of his authorship is imperative–interrogative, and yet his imperatives

don’t quite command: “Look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin—see the

whelping of this lion.” His interrogatives—“What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this

old discontent?”—don’t quite question. His indicative mood—“There is One Mind common to

all individual men”—which doesn’t quite indicate, would be subjunctive or conditional for most

of us, and yet his subjunctives—“If we could have any security against moods!”—don’t quite set

themselves against fact, and his conditionals—“I would be content with knowing, if only I could

know”—ignore conditions. His positive degree is superlative—“Great is the soul, and plain”;

his superlative normative—“Each man seeks those of different quality from his own . . . that is,

he seeks other men, and the otherest”; and his comparative tragic: “The radical tragedy of nature

seems to be the distinction of More and Less.” Nor are his infinitives—“To finish the moment, to

find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is

wisdom”—quite infinite. For Emerson, the present is already a place where things happen that

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don’t: “Balances are kept. A man passes for what he is worth.” It is a demanding, vigorous

grammar, and he appears indifferent as to whether we’re persuaded by his rhetoric. “There is

much to say on both sides,” as he writes in his essay on Montaigne, and he very good at saying

both sides—so good, that many of his readers since 1836 have responded to him after the manner

of a certain Calvinist preacher then did: if Emerson went to hell, Father Taylor said, the devil

wouldn’t know what to do with him.

Like the Napoleon temperament he never practically secured or, as numerous awed and

incredulous accounts of his presence and behavior attest, displayed, Emerson’s texture is

insufferably commanding. Be he doesn’t write to test the waters for an upcoming campaign or to

bring others to the cause. His first word on any subject is his last, for the time being, until he

reprises it. He would, for example, rather not be writing a letter to President Van Buren

protesting the treatment of the Cherokee Indians in 1838. As it is, the intrusion proves useful to

him, sharpens his observation. He puts it another way in “Prudence”: “We write from aspiration

and antagonism as well as from experience.” He registers a protest with Van Buren, and contents

himself after that antagonism by recording what it was “like” in his Journal. It is like all the other

things he has to do as a father, a husband, a neighbor, a citizen of Concord and the United States.

It is like pulling weeds in his garden, which he also complains of as unfitting him for writing. As

a body, Emerson is content to suffer, to be screwed—but only if, as a writer, he can take it as a

legitimate expense. Like Thoreau, he is nothing if not scrupulous (“Balances are kept”).

Emerson may have aspired to be “like a block of marble during all the great events of his

life,” but he was too susceptible to his own, inconvenient temperament. A man certain that his

weakness is only skin-deep would hardly congratulate himself on taking revenge when he suffers

from it. But writing is the weakest form of revenge, and one’s dependence on and sympathy with

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others is a cost of doing business, the price to pay for “sharpened observation” and accurate

writing. The ground of independence is always unequally distributed. Emerson was so often

accused of being cold and inhuman, both by himself and by others, that he resigned himself to a

form of indifference: endless writing. “Utterance is place enough,” he told himself, not innocent

of 300 years of English prose in which “place” means one’s standing at court and, depending on

how far outside the court one is, one’s lack of standing. He may or may not have thought himself

all purple inside (he never strikes me as imperial or arrogant in tone), but he certainly sought no

outward badge or office to confirm it if he did. He worked (I think that’s the right word here,

despite its being overworked today in this context) to keep his center “unsounded”—unknown,

measureless, imperturbable, perhaps even to him. He imagined the center of his “nature,” his

“action & habit,” again and again: as a block of marble, a hand, a “zero degree of indifferency.”

But human contact reacquainted him with his impassive core, which was also his “irritable

texture”: poverty, dependence, humiliation, degradation, shame, grief, nakedness, bareness.

John Jay Chapman thought that Emerson knew “human sentiment mainly in the form of

pain. His nature shunned it; he cast it off as quickly as possible.” The record as a whole,

Emerson’s Journals included, which Chapman had no access to in 1897, don’t support this

reading, or not as flatly as Chapman states it. The book is not the man, not reliably and

consistently. In a recurring mood, Emerson may have wanted to be as finished as a sculpture,

like the one he writes of in “History”:

composed of incorrupt, sharply defined, and symmetrical features, whose eye-

sockets are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint, and take

furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole head.

But the classic features of anyone’s thought are hard to square with the romantic, with the sense

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of oneself as a “fragment,” an unsettler of all things, someone always “in transition,” shooting

gulfs and darting to aims. Emerson doesn’t “choose to resist duality, complexity,” but loves

repose as much as walking, and no sooner praises the one mood than wishes for the other. The

blurry, the furtive, the partial; the sharply defined, the incorrupt, the whole: he gives each its

passing due.

I like Emerson’s ecstatic stability, when he wants to have it both ways, all ways; I’m put

off when he plays transcendentalist and trumps skepticism with belief. He seems to have been

incapable of thorough skepticism, but he talks the theory and practice of doubt and the

composition of randomness so capably—his essays have a brief anthology’s-worth of dialogues

in them, rarely laid out as such—that I want him to stop there. He moves again. He tells me

what I’m doing to him: fixing him “to his last position, whilst he as inevitable advances.” He tells

me what he’s doing: “I play with the miscellany of facts, and take those superficial views which

we call skepticism; but I know that they will presently appear to me in that order which makes

skepticism impossible.” He seems to have wanted, and feared, to lose himself “in the desultory

questions,” to abandon himself to the “lovable madness of Individuality,” the “available rules”

of life, the “Actual Order of things.” But “the mysteries of temperament” being “deeper than

the mysteries of occupation,” as Chapman said, Emerson—and Thoreau and Ellery Channing,

too— held out for something undaunted and untethered.

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