Not Back but Through
Richardson’s account of resilience in the face of great loss leaves out the potential for our suffering to do us good.
Review by Sarah Clark
Part of my job as editor at Fare Forward is to comb through lists of publishers’ recent and upcoming books, looking for interesting titles to review for this newsletter. When I see a title that reminds me of someone, I shoot off a message asking them if they’d like to read and write about the book. But one day last fall, I came across a book in Princeton University Press’s catalog that made me think of myself. The book was Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives. I was not quite five years out from the death of my mother and mother-in-law just ten months apart, and I knew that my father’s death could not be long distant (it came this past October). I could, I thought, probably benefit from knowing how some great writers dealt with the deaths of their loved ones.
So I requested the book to review, despite knowing no more than the bare minimum about its subjects (though like everyone, I read Walden in high school), and nothing at all about its author. Robert D. Richardson is, as I subsequently learned, best known for his biographies of this same trio of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James (brother of novelist Henry James), and secondly for his long marriage to the brilliant nature writer Annie Dillard. He wrote this slim volume (just under 100 pages) about a year before his own death in 2020, and it was published posthumously in 2023.
In the brief preface, Richardson explains that his purpose in writing Three Roads Back was to examine the quality of resilience in these three historic figures. To look to the examples of the past, he says, has long been an aid to him in confronting the difficulties and travails of the present. In addition to the resilience displayed by each of his subjects, Richardson goes on to summarize the unique offerings he derives from each of the three: from Emerson, “self-reliance, which he understood to mean self-trust, not self-sufficiency,” from Thoreau, “to look to Nature—to the green world—rather than to political party, country, family, or religion for guidance on how to live,” and from James, “to look to actual human experience, case by case, rather than to dogma or theory.”
Richardson is, of course, an expert on the life and thought of all three of his subjects, and his book is impressively researched and elegantly written. His accounts of the various losses, of a wife for Emerson, a brother for Thoreau (followed shortly by the death of his dear friend Emerson’s young son), and a beloved young cousin for James, are touchingly empathetic. But ultimately, I was disappointed with the conclusions which Richardson, by way of his three thinkers, came to.
Despite my lack of expertise in Emerson’s life and thought, I cannot help but see some alternatives to this interpretation of events.
Moving chronologically, Richardson begins his account with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, at the age of twenty-seven, lost his wife of just over a year to tuberculosis. She was only nineteen. Emerson was, in his own words, “unstrung, debilitated by grief” and overcome by “miserable apathy.” He walked to the cemetery to visit Ellen’s grave every day for more than a year. About fourteen months after his wife’s death, Richardson recounts, Emerson went to her mausoleum as usual, but this time, he opened her tomb to look at her remains. Nothing is recorded about that experience, Richardson explains. About two months after that, however, Emerson recanted his faith and resigned his position as the junior minister of a Unitarian church. This disavowal was, as Richardson points out, not tentative, but rather quite definite and fully formed: Emerson stated in his final sermon, “I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican Astronomy to have made the theological scheme of Redemption absolutely incredible.” Emerson was done with “formal, inherited, traditional Christianity” for good.
Richardson writes of this progression of events approvingly, noting, “As he had to see Ellen’s remains for himself, so he now realized and accepted that he had to think for himself as well.” It was only after this rejection that Emerson was able to travel, to meet new people, and ultimately to find a new vocation as a naturalist and essayist. The rest of the section on Emerson recounts these events and the beginning of his career as a writer and speaker and describes his powerful belief in the “religion of Nature” contra traditional Christian beliefs.
Despite my lack of expertise in Emerson’s life and thought, I cannot help but see some alternatives to this interpretation of events. Could the act of looking into the tomb of a loved one to see their decaying body be motivated by courage or strength of mind? Certainly—but it could also be the act of a mind overcome by and obsessed with grief. Nor do I see the same straight line from the sight of physical decay to a belief in the finality of death that Richardson draws; traditional Christianity, after all, is quite definite on the point that we are dust and to dust we shall return, even as it teaches us to hope for the eventual resurrection of the body. Moreover, though Richardson wants to describe Emerson’s rejection of the Christian “scheme of redemption” as merely “an inescapable intellectual conclusion,” he also includes a journal entry in which Emerson “lists the defects of Jesus” with “a real edge” following the death of his brother a few years after the loss of wife, which doesn’t exactly bolster his case for Emerson’s rejection of God being wholly cool and rational.
There is similarly motivated reasoning in the book’s other two sections, though not to quite such an extent as in the first. Richardson is obviously in agreement with Thoreau’s conclusion, in the months after his brother’s sudden death from tetanus, that contemplating the natural processes of birth, death, and decay are an effective antidote to grief, writing, “Individuals die; nature lives on. This is easy to say, but if it is really meant—lived, felt—it is thrilling.” The section on James is the weakest as well as the briefest; per Richardson’s account he was already suffering from a depressive episode when his cousin died, and “It is not clear exactly how, or whether, this episode was connected with or grew out of Minny’s death,” but “the spirit of resilience somehow came upon him.” It is certainly possible, as Richardson argues, that her death had to do with James’s philosophical breakthrough around the same time, but even Richardson declines to state this possibility too confidently.
There may be a better way to face loss even than bearing it courageously.
There are different ways of looking at resilience, and certainly more than one way of courageously bearing the suffering inherent to human life. Emerson, Thoreau, and James all lived through terrible losses and went on to contribute to the store of human knowledge, helping to shape the philosophy of their young country. Yet there may be a better way to face loss even than bearing it courageously.
In his book The End of Suffering, poet and professor Scott Cairns writes, “Our afflictions drag us—more or less kicking—into a fresh and vivid awareness that we are not in control of our circumstances, that we are not quite whole, that our days are salted with affliction.” In other words, suffering and loss should teach us not that we can control the reins of our own destinies, if only we throw off the shackles of belief and learn to think for ourselves, but rather that we cannot control those reins no matter what we do or believe. If this is so, then perhaps in insisting that his wife’s death was final, bearing no hope of resurrection and reconciliation, Emerson rejected not only hope, but also the burden of waiting for that hope to be fulfilled.
Cairns goes on, “If we take care to acknowledge these truths, and are canny enough to attend to them, faithful enough to lean into them, then the particular ache of that waking can initiate a response that the Greeks were wont to call kenosis—an emptying, an efficacious hollowing. Under ideal circumstances and duly appreciated, this hollowing can lead us into something of a hallowing as well.” That hallowing, as he goes on to describe throughout the rest of the book, consists in our acknowledging and embracing our own membership in the body of Christ. Through our own suffering, we participate in and come to know the suffering of every single other person around us. “My hope for healing,” he writes, “lies in my becoming more of a person, and more intimately connected to others.” And a little later: “Simply put, an isolated individual does not a person make.” The most effective (and efficacious) path through suffering is not to make it through—not to “get over it”—but to embrace and make use of that suffering, allowing it to lead you closer to God and to your neighbor. This, I believe, requires as much if not more courage than learning to stand on your own two feet.
Simone Weil wrote, “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.” Richardson’s account of the “three roads” through loss taken by Emerson, Thoreau, and James certainly shows three men who overcame the depression and inertia that often accompanies grief and went on to think and write again—even without resorting to supernatural aid. Their resilience demonstrates the home truth that even in the face of devastating loss, life does indeed go on, and the world continues to turn. But I found more help for my own situation in Cairns’s book than in Richardson’s, and I have lately found myself praying with Cairns, “May our afflictions be few, but may we learn not to squander them.”
Sarah Clark lives in New Hampshire with her family. She is a founding editor of Fare Forward and the current editor-in-chief, and she owns Scale House Print Shop, a letterpress printing studio. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2011 and received an MAR from Yale Divinity School in 2022.
Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives was published by Princeton University Press on January 24, 2023. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy to our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
