{"id":8927,"date":"2024-03-06T15:21:54","date_gmt":"2024-03-06T15:21:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=8927"},"modified":"2024-03-06T15:23:54","modified_gmt":"2024-03-06T15:23:54","slug":"three-roads-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/06\/three-roads-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Roads Back"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Not Back but Through<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Richardson\u2019s account of resilience in the face of great loss leaves out the potential for our suffering to do us good.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Sarah Clark
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Part of my job as editor at Fare Forward<\/em> is to comb through lists of publishers\u2019 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\u2019d like to read<\/a> and write about<\/a> the book<\/a>. But one day last fall, I came across a book in Princeton University Press\u2019s 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<\/em>. 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>

So I requested the book to review, despite knowing no more than the bare minimum about its subjects (though like everyone, I read Walden<\/em> 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.<\/p>

In the brief preface, Richardson explains that his purpose in writing Three Roads Back<\/em> was to examine the quality of resilience<\/em> 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, \u201cself-reliance, which he understood to mean self-trust, not self-sufficiency,\u201d from Thoreau, \u201cto look to Nature\u2014to the green world\u2014rather than to political party, country, family, or religion for guidance on how to live,\u201d and from James, \u201cto look to actual human experience, case by case, rather than to dogma or theory.\u201d<\/p>

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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Despite my lack of expertise in Emerson\u2019s life and thought, I cannot help but see some alternatives to this interpretation of events.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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, \u201cunstrung, debilitated by grief\u201d and overcome by \u201cmiserable apathy.\u201d He walked to the cemetery to visit Ellen\u2019s grave every day for more than a year. About fourteen months after his wife\u2019s 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, \u201cI regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican Astronomy to have made the theological scheme of Redemption absolutely incredible.\u201d Emerson was done with \u201cformal, inherited, traditional Christianity\u201d for good.<\/p>

Richardson writes of this progression of events approvingly, noting, \u201cAs he had to see Ellen\u2019s remains for himself, so he now realized and accepted that he had to think for himself as well.\u201d 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 \u201creligion of Nature\u201d contra traditional Christian beliefs.<\/p>

Despite my lack of expertise in Emerson\u2019s 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\u2014but 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\u2019s rejection of the Christian \u201cscheme of redemption\u201d as merely \u201can inescapable intellectual conclusion,\u201d he also includes a journal entry in which Emerson \u201clists the defects of Jesus\u201d with \u201ca real edge\u201d following the death of his brother a few years after the loss of wife, which doesn\u2019t exactly bolster his case for Emerson\u2019s rejection of God being wholly cool and rational.<\/p>

There is similarly motivated reasoning in the book\u2019s other two sections, though not to quite such an extent as in the first. Richardson is obviously in agreement with Thoreau\u2019s conclusion, in the months after his brother\u2019s sudden death from tetanus, that contemplating the natural processes of birth, death, and decay are an effective antidote to grief, writing, \u201cIndividuals die; nature lives on. This is easy to say, but if it is really meant\u2014lived, felt\u2014it is<\/em> thrilling.\u201d The section on James is the weakest as well as the briefest; per Richardson\u2019s account he was already suffering from a depressive episode when his cousin died, and \u201cIt is not clear exactly how, or whether, this episode was connected with or grew out of Minny\u2019s death,\u201d but \u201cthe spirit of resilience somehow came upon him.\u201d It is certainly possible, as Richardson argues, that her death had to do with James\u2019s philosophical breakthrough around the same time, but even Richardson declines to state this possibility too confidently.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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There may be a better way to face loss even than bearing it courageously.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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.<\/p>

In his book The End of Suffering<\/em>, poet and professor Scott Cairns writes, \u201cOur afflictions drag us\u2014more or less kicking\u2014into 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.\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>

Cairns goes on, “If we take care to acknowledge these truths, and are canny enough to attend to them, faithful enough to lean into<\/em> them, then the particular ache of that waking can initiate a response that the Greeks were wont to call kenosis<\/em>\u2014an emptying, an efficacious hollowing<\/em>. Under ideal circumstances and duly appreciated, this hollowing can lead us into something of a hallowing<\/em> 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. \u201cMy hope for healing,\u201d he writes, \u201clies in my becoming more of a person, and more intimately connected to others.\u201d And a little later: \u201cSimply put, an isolated individual does not a person make.\u201d The most effective (and efficacious) path through suffering is not to make it through\u2014not to \u201cget over it\u201d\u2014but 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.<\/p>

Simone Weil wrote, \u201cThe extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.\u201d Richardson\u2019s account of the \u201cthree roads\u201d 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\u2014even 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\u2019s book than in Richardson\u2019s, and I have lately found myself praying with Cairns, \u201cMay our afflictions be few, but may we learn not to squander them.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Sarah Clark<\/strong> lives in New Hampshire with her family. She is a founding editor of Fare Forward<\/em> and the current editor-in-chief, and she owns Scale House Print Shop<\/a>, a letterpress printing studio. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2011 and received an MAR from Yale Divinity School in 2022.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives<\/strong> was published by Princeton University Press on January 24, 2023. Fare Forward<\/em> appreciates their provision of an advance copy to our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.<\/a><\/p>

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Richardson\u2019s account of resilience in the face of great loss leaves out the potential for our suffering to do us good. 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