American Philosophy (15 page)

Something strange happened to time at West Wind; it flew, or condensed, or simply vanished. I shook my head and pulled myself up from the Adirondack chair, shot a single glance at the sun, and blindly traced my way back to the library. Entering the library on a sunny afternoon was a bit like stepping into a dark, moist cave. Carol hadn't budged an inch in the last hour. She was still bent over, head down, writing furiously. “Are you okay?” I asked, mimicking her intensely strained posture. “How about a break?”

“No, it's okay. I want to finish this before dinner.”

I wanted to tell her that there was no way to “finish this before dinner.” In fact, I had the hunch that we'd never get our heads around West Wind. All you can do is pace yourself and enjoy the fact that there will always be something to do tomorrow.

“All right,” I said, “but let's go to town in about an hour and have a drink.” She didn't respond. I went and looked over her shoulder at the open title page: John Stuart Mill.
On Liberty.
London. 1859. First edition. I could now understand her concentration. This was a truly exceptional book. Along with Kant, Mill is one of the heroes of the liberal tradition. Unlike Kant, Mill was a thoroughgoing feminist who believed, like many American thinkers, that freedom was not simply a luxury for the chosen few.

I started to make some remark, but she told me to go back to my Plato.

It didn't take me long to lose myself in the shelves again. There were more than enough little mysteries to keep me occupied. The collection at West Wind was full of books from the personal libraries of American intellectuals, but the collection of Neoplatonic philosophy was different. I pulled out a surprising volume: Ralph Cudworth's
The True Intellectual System of the Universe
from 1678. First edition. The provenance was not American, but British. I guessed that Hocking had sought it out or, more likely, stumbled across it on one of his many trips to Europe. Turning the little masterpiece over in my hands, I wasn't sure that people would regard it as a collector's item, but they should. Ralph Cudworth, born in 1617, was similar to Hocking in that he was a nearly famous philosopher. He was part of the interesting group of thinkers known as the Cambridge Platonists, who took over two colleges at the University of Cambridge in the seventeenth century. Cudworth joined his more famous colleague Henry More as a fellow at Christ's College, which, along with Emmanuel College, was the stomping ground of the Puritans in Elizabethan times. I could draw some vague connection between the book and the formation of American thought, but making one between Cudworth and American philosophy was a bit harder. Christ's College is a weird nook of a college. It houses the smartest students at the university, as it has for the last three centuries. I remembered wandering through a parlor of Christ's while I was studying at Cambridge (I was at Magdalene, a much more average college—but I liked to walk around and pretend), where I spotted a portrait of one of Christ's most illustrious students, Charles Darwin. Yes, this book must have had a rather strange history.

I stared down at the flyleaf: “T. H. Huxley,” scrawled in what struck me as the tight script of a thirty-year-old. Over time, I imagined that Thomas Huxley's autograph loosened up a bit, as most of ours do, but it looked like whoever penned this signature was more than a little tightly wound. Huxley was the grandfather of Aldous Huxley, the author of the famous dystopian novel
Brave New World
, but he was more than just Aldous's grandfather. In the 1860s he was nicknamed “Darwin's bulldog,” a name he came by honestly. He'd met Darwin in the early 1850s and was among the first to read
On the Origin of Species
when it came out in 1859. In November of that year he wrote to Darwin to express his adamant support:

As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite … I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse & misrepresentation which unless I greatly mistake is in store for you … And as to the curs which will bark & yelp—you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which … may stand you in good stead—I am sharpening up my claws & beak in readiness.

Huxley was a ruthless defender of Darwin. I'd like to have friends like that—the type who would “go to the Stake” for me. What I found somewhat baffling was Huxley's willingness to defend Darwin while at the same time regularly and forcefully disagreeing with him. I couldn't conceive of a relationship like that, but Huxley and Darwin both fought and loved each other quite effectively. Huxley thought that Darwin's understanding of gradual evolution did not match up with the empirical evidence; he maintained that nature worked in leaps and bounds, through periods of evolutionary stasis followed by rapid spurts of growth. He also suggested that Darwin had downplayed the dangerous implications of his theory—namely, that
all
animals, including humans, had specific evolutionary histories. Darwin eventually got around to making this claim in
The Descent of Man
in 1871, but Huxley beat him to the punch by nearly a decade. In 1863 Huxley published
Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature
and became the first person in history to apply modern evolutionary theory to human beings.

I paged through the book. What was Darwin's bulldog doing reading Neoplatonism? It was possible that Darwin himself paged through this very book too. Improbable, but this was a time for indulging the improbable.

“Are you ready for that drink?”

“Nearly ready,” I answered. I wanted to stay in the dimly lit library and figure out this little philosophical puzzle about Plato, Huxley, evolution, and American philosophy, but I wanted to get that drink more. My eyes and legs told me it was time to go; we could come back tomorrow. It was a long weekend, and I was happy that we wouldn't have to rush back to normal life. I thought Carol might want to go home after one night and was thrilled that I'd not completely alienated her in the last twenty-four hours. We picked up our belongings, packed the books, and headed for the door.

“Do you mind”—she paused, as if to acknowledge the strangeness of her request—“if we don't sleep at the library tonight? I actually didn't get much rest. Isn't there a place with a bed around here where two people could sleep?”

Yes, there were a bunch of shady motels on Route 16. They had “sordid affair” written all over them—one small bed per room, rented by the hour. But there was a place—I thought it might be called the Brass Heart Inn—at the base of Chocorua. I was sure we could find a room with twin beds or two small rooms. More appropriate for traveling with a married woman.

“Okay,” I said, “no problem. But you have to promise me something.”

“Oh?”

“You have to promise to wake up early to climb the mountain with me.”

“Okay.” She smiled. “Deal.”

 

ON THE MOUNTAIN

“Carol—” I knocked at her door softly. “Carol, are you up?”

I waited for a good three minutes and then tried again in a forced whisper.

A little moan slipped under the door. “Seriously? The mountain? It's still dark.”

I persisted, and after a few minutes the door creaked open. Carol, who is quite trim, emerged looking like the Michelin Man. She hadn't packed a pillow, but she'd apparently remembered an ancient puffy coat from her years in Canada. One of the few things Carol hates more than losing an argument or looking unfashionable is being cold.

“Not a word, colleague. This coat is warmer than dignity.”

The roadside cafés in northern New Hampshire didn't open before dawn, so we were stuck with the pot of leftover coffee at the local gas station. We drove north on Route 16 through the tiny whitewashed town of Chocorua, past the James homestead tucked back a few hundred feet from the road. There's a rumor in town that his ashes are buried on the premises. James bought the farm in 1886, later adding land he purchased from William Ralph Emerson, Ralph Waldo's cousin and a partner at the nineteenth-century architectural firm Emerson and Fehmer. This Emerson actually built the James house on Irving Street in Cambridge.

After passing James's farmhouse on the right, we slowed to a creep. It was easy to miss the next turn, just an opening in the woods marked by a small wooden sign:
BOWDITCH RUNNELLS STATE FOREST
. Right before the sign, Scott Road veers off so suddenly that it's hard to tell it's a road at all. The year before, I'd learned this lesson the hard way—zipping to the trailhead in the dark, I'd blown by the turn and come frighteningly close to driving straight into the Chocorua River. This time I flipped on the high beams and covered the brakes. At some point in the past, massive hunks of granite had been dragged down the hill and assembled into what looked like a giant's house. It was Nickerson Mill, a sawmill that had been owned by Bunn Nickerson's family in the late nineteenth century. I'd heard that when the Bowditches—a family of Harvard intellectuals and conservationists—moved into the area, they bought the mill so that the Nickersons would quit polluting the stream and lake with sawdust. Now that I thought of it, Bunn's family owned much of the valley at one time. One of his distant relatives had run the Chocorua House, the town's earliest inn, in the 1860s. Bunn's comment to “go look around” on our first trip to West Wind now made a bit more sense. He had a feeling of ownership that came from having deep roots in the place.

A mile or so past the mill ruins, just before Scott Road dead-ended, I turned into a protected glen at the head of the Hammond Trail. Carol was now fully awake, but she wasn't ready to get out of the car. It was still dark, and the rustling of the leaves in the wind convinced her that the woods were haunted. Besides, there was the distinct possibility of meeting up with bears.

The first stretch of Hammond Trail, before it jogs up Bald Mountain and then to Chocorua, is covered with old beech trees that have a smooth gray bark. If you look at the trees in bear country, you can get a sense of the size of the creatures you're dealing with. The previous year, I'd walked a mere ten minutes up Hammond Trail before I saw a stand of trees with black pockmarks in scattered sets of four at eye height on the trunks. This beast wasn't huge, but it was big enough to mess up your face without much trouble. I let this detail slide and avoided telling her about Stonybrook, at the end of Scott Road.
That
place was definitely haunted. It was one of the oldest farmhouses in the valley, built in the 1830s by my guess. It had been purchased by a woman named Ellen Putnam at the end of the nineteenth century, and it looked completely abandoned. Surrounded by beech and hemlock, the stark white house looked like something out of
The Shining
.

I suspected that any ghosts frequenting Hammond Trail would have been quite pleased to have two philosophers trekking into the forest again. William James, Henry Bowditch, and James Jackson Putnam had been colleagues in medical school in the 1870s. Henry and William were fellow ghost hunters, séance sitters, and psychical researchers (another tidbit I failed to tell Carol). Their families vacationed together regularly and believed that woodland adventures and intellectual ones went hand in hand. Escapes involved hiking, swimming, and sport—activities that allowed American intellectuals of the time to convince each other that they'd not gone entirely soft. Many of these excursions were also meant as therapy to treat James's fragile psyche.

In the summer of 1875 the small group that James fondly called the Adirondack Doctors traveled to Beede's Boarding House, in Keene Valley in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. After several summers visiting the mountains, the Harvard scholars pooled their money and bought a tract of land and a few primitive cottages. Their compound, Putnam Camp, was modeled on an academic retreat set up by the previous generation of American thinkers—“The Philosophers' Camp,” which attracted members of the Saturday Club, especially Emerson and the famous naturalist Louis Agassiz. James and his friends wanted to re-create some of the Philosophers' Camp's glory in Keene. They managed handily, drawing their own unique crowd of luminaries: Carl Jung, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and Royce's students, among them William Ernest Hocking, Richard Cabot, and Ella Lyman Cabot. Sigmund Freud, who visited the camp in 1909, reflected on his time there as the “most amazing experience” he'd had in the United States. From the very beginning, William James had similar feelings about the place. On his first trip in 1876, he remarked that creating the Putnam Camp was “the most salutary thing [he'd] ever [done].” Keene provided a setting where he could be his very best self—physically active, intellectually stimulated, and socially at ease. It was here, on a summer day in 1876, that James rendezvoused with Alice Gibbens, the woman who would later become his wife. In the summer of 1886 he and Alice decided to find another summer retreat near Chocorua, and the Bowditch and Putnam families came with them. I longed for a time when philosophy meetings took place in the outdoors—without the pretensions that come with conference rooms and titles.

I finally convinced Carol that it was no longer night, and we made our way slowly up the hill. It was still impossible to see the trail blazes, but the ascent, at least at first, was gradual and marked with rocks that one could make out in the gloaming. I looked up the hill at Carol's Michelin Man silhouette. I loved that silhouette.

The trail made its first switchback and turned sharply uphill. On a trip to Chocorua to visit his brother, Henry James had gotten lost on this trail, and even in broad daylight it took him several hours to make his way back to camp. The sun was still not up, and leaves had fallen the previous week, which meant that we could go badly astray or slip to our deaths. Thoreau might be right, I thought, that “an early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day”—but only if one actually survives to see the day. So we found a little outcropping of rocks halfway up the mountain and sat down in the darkness. The sun would've been nice at the top, but there was something strangely magical about this time and place, a sort of “not quite” that lingered just long enough for one actually to savor the coming of dawn.