Glad to the Brink of Fear

January 15, 2024
Literary critic Marcus (Amazonia) serves up a distinctive biography of philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson that homes in on “those elements of Emerson’s life that spoke to me most directly.” Fortunately, Marcus’s instincts are a good guide to the shifting sands of Emerson’s life and thought. Examining how grief shaped his subject’s outlook, Marcus explains that Emerson was distraught after the deaths of his first wife in 1831 and his eldest son at age five 11 years later, leading him to adopt a solipsistic view of human consciousness as fundamentally lonely and unable to close the gap between self and other (“The soul blots out everything else, including your wife’s soul, and maybe your dead son’s,” writes Marcus). Elsewhere, Marcus grapples with Emerson’s complicated views on race (he was an abolitionist who claimed that whites were superior to Black people) and his tumultuous friendship with protégé Henry David Thoreau, whom Emerson was at first enamored with, but came to view as a disappointment after Thoreau’s poetry career stalled. Marcus provides astute insight into how Emerson’s life influenced his transcendentalist beliefs, and the empathetic portrayal of Emerson’s decline into dementia and tender relationship with his eldest daughter, who was his primary caregiver at the end of his life, is a poignant highlight. The result is a discerning take on an essential 19th-century American thinker. Photos.

February 15, 2024
Ralph Waldo Emerson is the embodiment of American letters--individualistic, self-reliant, and guided by rational thought. Marcus' psychologically astute portrait demonstrates that such tidy summaries fail to capture the genius of this complicated thinker who considered his life's work to be "the infinitude of the private man."" Indeed, Emerson absorbed the world. He cogitated on nature and the nature of life and documented his thoughts in his commonplace books. Emerson came from a long line of ministers and seemed destined for the pulpit. Instead, he turned to writing essays, a form well suited to someone accustomed to listening to and delivering sermons. Marcus' three-dimensional sketch shows Emerson as husband, father, friend, and mentor. Emerson was driven to grief at the loss of his beloved first wife and son Waldo, yet often seemed to prioritize practicality over passion. His second wife, Lidian, called him Mr. Emerson, and her activist fervor likely influenced his own. Marcus' deeply personal interpretation illuminates an iconic prophet who discovered that seeking the meaning of life turns out to be the meaning of life.

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