American Philosophy by John Kaag Page B

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