Near to the World of Spirits
Henry was happy in the new year, scribbling away in his room at the top of the stairs in the Emerson house. He read Walter Raleigh1 and listened to a music box. Downstairs, over the fire, he popped popcorn—a food he loved—for the Emerson children. He would arrive with ears of popcorn in his pockets, climb to the attic to retrieve the old brass warming pan, and slowly heat the corn over the big fire. Gradually the rattle of kernels changed to popping. When the pan reached its peak of fireworks inside, Henry would hold it in his firm patient grip above the laughing children seated on the rug and lift the lid as the popcorn spilled out and showered them. One night he noted in his journal that heating the kernels in a pan created “a more rapid blossoming2 of the seed under a greater than July heat.”
He enjoyed these domestic evenings with the children. Finally named after several weeks without an official identity, little Edith was not yet three months old. Lidian had wanted to name her Lucy Cotton3 after her mother, but Emerson had resisted, still arguing that the child be named Lidian, which Lidian herself refused. Ellen was a charming and lively two and a half. Waldo was five and busier than ever, his father’s pet and acolyte. Daily his grandmother taught his reading lesson and he was making progress in spelling. Waldo was curious about everything, picking up and deciphering each item in his father’s study—magnet, globe, microscope. He loved tools and would walk around carrying pincers or a hammer. He liked to bring his share of wood for his grandmother’s fire, and he was fascinated by the kinds of coal his father used in the study fireplace. Calm and grave, he would explore the barn and examine the hens’ nests and survey the doghouse.
Now that Henry had lived in the Emerson household for a year, he and Waldo were fast chums. Firm and gentle and as serious as his young charge, Henry could whittle or mend toy guns and unsinkable boats that Emerson could never match. Henry helped Waldo with an ongoing construction project—a toy house, to parts of which the boy gave fanciful names such as the coridaga and the interspeglium. Waldo loved to blow the willow whistle that Henry had carved for him. Once when a storm rumbled nearby during his performance, he interrupted himself to exclaim, “My music makes the thunder dance!”4
After ending 1841 with an ode to nature and natural history books, Henry began the new year thinking about the judgmental aspects of Christianity. “The practical faith of me belies the preacher’s consolation,” he scrawled in his journal. Happy in his poetic longings and his heresy, he wrote, “There is no infidelity so great5 as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and founds churches.”
New Year’s Day 1842 dawned cold. It was a Saturday. At the Thoreau home that afternoon, John was stropping his straight razor, prior to shaving, when he slightly nicked his left hand. It was a tiny cut on the tip of his ring finger, barely slicing off a flap of skin that he simply pressed back over the slight wound and wrapped tightly with a small piece of rag. It didn’t bleed much.
The cut caused John only minor inconvenience over the next couple of days. Then, rather than healing, it began to hurt again. John removed the bandage and found that while one side of the piece of skin had grown back to the rest of the fingertip, as he expected, the other side was mortified—had developed gangrene. Such changes were alarming, but he thought that probably the wound would heal.
On Saturday, the eighth of January, Henry was at home6 rather than at the Emerson house. Most of his family were ailing and needed tending. John’s finger hurt enough that he couldn’t help much around the house, so Henry did most of the work.
That evening John finally consulted a doctor. Most people turned to physicians only as a last resort, when despair convinced them to submit to the medical arsenal of calomel as a purgative, ipecac as an emetic, the laxatives castor oil and senna, and a regimen of molasses-and-sulfur (picturesquely called treacle-and-brimstone in England). A familiar sight around the village and countryside, tall, long-nosed Josiah Bartlett had practiced medicine in Concord since shortly after his graduation from Harvard Medical School in 1819, following in the footsteps of his near-legendary medical father. The junior Bartlett bragged that in all his years attending ill Concordians, only once had weather prevented him from reaching a patient, and that was when snow was so deep that his sleigh overturned every couple of rods. Even then, determined to proceed, he had unharnessed the horse and climbed astride its bare back—only to slide down across its rump and crupper as the horse floundered through belly-high drifts. Bartlett must have found this mishap humiliating, because he was a proud horseman, known for riding and driving at a horse’s top speed. It was Bartlett whom Henry and John had gently refused two and a half years earlier, when he requested that they take his son on their river adventure.
Bartlett was a committed reformer who joined the Concord Social Club in 1822 and thereafter was involved in many local issues. In his everyday work, he saw the devastating effects of drink,7 which turned him into a crusader against its abuse, especially by laborers, among whom alcohol was considered good for a strong man. Too often he had watched hard-drinking patients succumb to disease or surgery that a healthy constitution would have overcome. In 1834 he had joined with his fellow physician Edward Jarvis—who, during the 1826–27 school year, had been Henry’s teacher—to survey sales of wine, beer, and whiskey by every trader and tavern keeper in Concord. Drink was not an issue in the Thoreau family, certainly not with upright, gentlemanly John, who had even gone so far as to publicly sign a temperance pledge.8 He debated a long time before doing so, worrying about the loss of his own independence because he would feel bound by a public declaration of moral behavior. He wouldn’t commit to the temperance stance until he felt he fully agreed with it.
On this day Bartlett removed John’s bandage, examined the tiny cut, then cleaned and dressed the wound. Assuming that this would be the end of the matter, John started walking home in the cold winter evening. On the way he began experiencing acute pain in various parts of his body, some of it so strong he could barely make his way back to the big white Thoreau boardinghouse.
The next morning, Sunday, family friend Nathan Brooks came to get Henry at the Emerson house and reported John’s horrifying new symptom:9 his jaw muscles were stiffening. By evening violent spasms racked his body. Everyone in the family knew what these symptoms meant. They presaged a disease that had tormented humanity as far back as history remembered—tetanus, or lockjaw as it was usually called because its symptoms included stiffening muscles of the mouth and throat. Constantly warring humanity had long ago recognized a link between battle wounds and the fatal convulsions that sometimes followed. Gradually people realized that sometimes an innocent mishap could have the same tragic result; centuries before Christ, Hippocrates recorded a death from tetanus that resulted from a minor wound to a finger. As recently as 1809, the Scottish anatomist and surgeon Charles Bell had painted a terrifying portrait of a tetanus victim in final spasm, with his head and heels supporting his arched body like the abutments of a bridge. From clenched toes and corded calves, the figure curved upward and back down to fists held close and a flung-back head grinning like a jack-o’-lantern. The Thoreau family may not have known, but surely Dr. Bartlett did, that with bitter irony tetanus often left its victims grinning. Risus sardonicus, the ancients called the rictus resulting from contraction of the facial muscles in death.
The family quickly arranged to consult a doctor from Boston, but to no avail. He told John that he would die very soon, that he wouldn’t suffer long but that his death would be painful.
John accepted this warning without hysterics or even visible shock. But he couldn’t resist asking quietly, “Is there no hope?”
The doctor had seen too many cases of lockjaw. Whatever caused it, like whatever caused so many other ailments, was unknown, invisible, and unstoppable. His reply was simple:
“None.”
When he learned his fate, John quoted the words that Jesus uttered after Pilate’s men came for him in the garden by the brook Cedron. After Simon Peter drew his sword and slashed off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Jesus ordered him to sheathe his weapon. Then he asked the question that John Thoreau quoted: “The cup that my father gives me— Shall I not drink it?” John added quietly that he knew he was going to die, but that God had always been good to him and he would trust Him now.
Through his remaining few days of pain and fear, the family was impressed to find that John tried to be as playful and serene while dying of lockjaw as he had been while climbing Nawshawtuct Hill in search of Indian arrowheads. Henry saw glimmers of John’s calm former self10 even in his brother’s last delirium. Henry embraced John in death as he had in life. He tended his brother’s every need for his remaining time.
After John bade farewell to his devastated mother and father, to tearful Sophia and Helen, he said to Henry, “Now sit down and talk to me of nature and poetry.”
Henry sat beside his brother.
With the good humor that had made him popular in better times, John said through stiffening jaws, “I shall be a good listener, for it is difficult for me to interrupt you.”
As Henry talked, delirious John smiled in a way that seemed to his desperate brother in this moment to transcend the endless suffering that plagued the world. Henry found himself sympathetically smiling back. Contorted in pain, John died early Tuesday afternoon, the eleventh of January, only ten days after nicking his finger and three days after the first symptoms appeared. Henry was holding John in his arms when he gasped his last choking breath.
On Wednesday morning, Henry returned to the Emerson house to pick up his few articles of clothing and other items. His family needed him at home. He told Lidian that he didn’t know when he would return. She could see that Henry barely kept from breaking down, but she admired his attempt to be stoic and even, though unconvincingly, cheerful.
Lidian asked Henry if, when John first became aware of his fate, he had reacted with shock.
“None at all.”11
The funeral sermon was delivered by the Reverend Barzillai Frost of Concord’s First Parish Church. In 1837, the year that Henry graduated from Harvard, Frost was ordained as a colleague of Dr. Ripley.12 Now, five years later, only a few months after Ripley’s death, he would be preaching John’s funeral. A graduate of both Harvard’s College and its Divinity School, Frost was highly qualified, but his discourses inspired mixed emotions in Concord. In an address at Harvard’s Divinity School, Emerson had parodied Frost: “The snowstorm was real; the preacher merely spectral.” Frost was notorious for his unintentionally funny asides, which challenged the sober facial expressions of the congregation, as when he remarked during a sermon, “The Lord hath dealt graciously with this people this year. He has spared us from the pestilence that walketh in the darkness and the destruction that cometh at noonday. True, we have had some chicken-pox and some measles.”
During the service, Frost recited some lines from a poem that John had written a few weeks before his death and given to Sophia.
Noble! the sympathetic tear!
Feeling we would not smother;
Knowest thou not that Jesus here,
Wept for a fallen brother?
Bid thou thy sacred grief to flow;
And while to man the tribute’s given,
Thou shalt communion with the “Father” know,
Thy tear’s a passport unto Heaven.
“Can it be possible,” Frost asked from the pulpit, “that that face, which greeted us but yesterday in our streets, with such an open brow, and bright smile, we shall see no more on earth . . . It brings us very near to the world of spirits. It makes our present possessions seem like shadows.” It was a long-winded and discursive oration, in which Frost inflated every grain of John’s character into material for a sermon. Yet Lidian Emerson considered the eulogy worthy of the admirable young man she had known.
At some point after their brother’s death, Sophia was talking with Henry and mentioned John’s affection for Ellen Sewall and his proposal to her on the beach at Scituate a year and a half earlier.
For some reason, Henry feigned innocence: “Did John love her too?”13
He kept a lock of his brother’s hair.14
Soon the already devastated Thoreau family had to face another crisis. Shortly after John’s funeral, Henry’s calm self-possession began to collapse. He sat staring into space, doing nothing, saying nothing. He didn’t reply to questions. Although exhausted themselves, Sophia and Helen tried to help Henry, who seemed to be steadily declining. They led him outdoors to try to interest him in nature, but to no avail.
Then, terrifying everyone, Henry came down with the same symptoms that had forecast the death of John. When Emerson returned from a trip on Saturday the twenty-second, Henry seemed in the throes of lockjaw. No one knew what caused the disease—not where it originated or how it might be communicated, except that typically a cut was involved. But when a doctor examined Henry, he found no cut anywhere, not even a scratch. For two or three days Henry lay with muscles stiff and jaws clenched. Then the attack seemed to fade, as if he had survived it. But people did not survive lockjaw. Perhaps, the family decided, Henry’s sympathy for John’s pain had overwhelmed him in his loss. Just as he had imitated aspects of John’s life—following him into teaching, studying Indians, and proposing to the same young woman—so Henry imitated his death.
By the twenty-fourth of January, Emerson was describing the incident mostly in the past tense, adding cautiously, “You may judge we were all alarmed15 & I not the least who have the highest hopes of this youth. This morning his affection be it what it may, is relieved essentially, & what is best, his own feeling of better health established.” Emerson went on to mention that he had been invited to a dinner honoring Charles Dickens, who had just arrived in Boston aboard the Britannia for a highly publicized tour of the United States. The young English writer’s fifth novel, Barnaby Rudge, had completed serialization only a couple of months earlier in Dickens’s own weekly periodical Master Humphrey’s Clock. Then came the update on the children. Emerson reported an incident that had taken place on Monday night, when Waldo dictated a letter to his cousin Willie, thanking him for sending a magic lantern. “I wish you would tell Cousin Willie,” he said from his bed, “that I have so many presents that I do not need that he should send me any more,” and then he added, “unless he wishes to very much.”
Then, as if the Thoreau and Emerson families had not suffered enough by losing John, little Waldo was struck with scarlet fever. Soon he had the sore throat, rash, and fever that characterized this scourge of small children, and on the evening of January 27, little more than two weeks after John’s death, he lost the fight. Emerson thought the boy sighed his last small breath16 like a bird. Afterward, Emerson and Lidian and Mrs. Jackson wept and talked for hours. Then the others went away. Immediately Emerson began writing brief letters to family—his brother William, Lidian’s sister Lucy, and others.
Needing to care for the baby and for two-and-a-half-year-old Ellen, Lidian sat up most of the night in the bedroom. With her husband sleeping elsewhere in the house, she took Ellen into their bed to comfort her. During the long dark hours, she felt that she was living two lives simultaneously, as scenes of each raced before her mind—one of her brief past time with lively, curious Waldo, and one of the long, empty-looking years ahead without him. So compelling were these painful visions that when daylight came and the others in the house stirred again, Lidian was surprised to find that only a few hours had passed since Waldo’s death. Emerson was at his desk, writing to Margaret Fuller, “Shall I ever dare to love17 any thing again.” Waldo’s cold little body was still in the house.
But the Emersons’ was the first generation to possess a new kind of memento after the death of a loved one—a daguerreotype. This brilliant new invention, which had been announced as recently as 1839 at a meeting of the Académie des sciences in Paris, was already being touted as a miraculous machine to preserve time. Originally exposures had taken hours or days, but over the last couple of years the process had been improved. A positive image, reversed as if in a mirror, was produced directly on a silver-iodide-coated copper plate, the result so sensitive to smudging that it had to be isolated under glass, inside a frame or a folding case.
Daguerreotype portraits still required excruciatingly slow exposures. Children posing for a photograph had to be coaxed into premature solemnity. The previous autumn, other friends and family members had been unable to talk the restless Waldo into sitting still long enough for the slow, boxy camera to capture his image. Only John had prevailed. At his behest that day at the photographer’s studio, Waldo, dressed in a dark girlish smock with a light ruffled collar, had sat in a wooden armchair with his hands folded in his lap. Thus the Emersons could gaze at a framed oval daguerreotype of Waldo—his expression solemn and faraway, his hair parted in the middle with bangs combed sideways into temporary obedience. His sculpted thin lips, so like his mother’s, had had to remain grave and still. Like the unrecorded movements of people strolling Paris boulevards as Daguerre took his early photographs, laughter was invisible to cameras, and even smiles faded while the inhumanly patient shutter waited for enough light to seep in. A person’s likeness could be preserved, distilling memories into a sober gray portrait magically drawn with light, but the fleeting gestures—smiles, raised eyebrows, the sparkle of life—were lost.
Both Henry and Emerson turned to their journals for private exclamations of grief. On the twenty-first of February, after a trip to Providence, Emerson returned to a house that felt deserted. “Dear friends find I,” he scrawled to himself, “but the wonderful Boy is gone. What a looking for miracles have I! As his walking into the room where we are would not surprise Ellen, so it would seem to me the most natural of all things.”
Just before John died, Henry had been confiding to his journal excited hopes about the future. Now, on a completely different path than the one he had envisioned, his days aching with loss, his every thought carefully stepping around the hole where John had stood, Henry could only wish that there might be no such thing as past or present or future. He wanted to escape the relentless linear rush of time. “Why does not God,” he wondered to himself, “make some mistake to show to us that time is a delusion.”
On the second of March, Henry wrote his first letter in many weeks, to Lucy Brown, to whom he had given the bouquet wrapped in his poem “Sic Vita” four years earlier. He tried his Transcendental best to sneak past the reality of his grief to grasp a symbol. “I do not wish,”18 he told her and himself, “to see John ever again—I mean him who is dead—but that other whom only he would have wished to see, or to be, of whom he was the imperfect representative. For we are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.” Of John he wrote, “Soon the ice will melt and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever.” Then he thought in similar terms about the loss of Waldo: “Neither will nature manifest any sorrow at his death, but soon the note of the lark will be heard down in the meadow, and fresh dandelions will spring from the old stocks where he plucked them last summer.”
For weeks, Henry lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. His interest in the natural world, in the life of the village, in his family—all faded away. He read little and seldom wrote in his journal. Eventually he became aware of his numbness and, typically, he wondered whether other creatures were ever plagued with this kind of malaise. Did not their dull animal routines bore them? He thought about hens on their nests in a hayloft, perched atop an egg as if gestating an idea, day after day, night after night—just sitting there. Did they have thoughts enough in their primitive brain to distract them from such a mindless task? Or did they sink into an unfeeling ennui? Do hens, he wondered, sleep?
Such thoughts distracted him only briefly from the ache of loss. “Where is my heart gone,”19 he wrote in his journal. It was a question without a question mark, because there was no answer; “—they say men cannot part with it and live.”
His need for the outdoors was slow to return, as he spent day after day indoors, staring at walls, being cared for by his sister and mother. Finally, in mid-March, he went for a solitary walk in the woods. Beforehand, he tried to find a book about nature that he could slip into his pocket, but he failed to locate among the dry pages any observations that advanced into the forest even as far as his own thoughts. So he went out with only memories to accompany him.
The sun shone brightly. He saw old people sniffing the air after the long winter and young people working in the dark bare fields. Color was returning to the earth, in the veined green leaves of skunk cabbage peeking up from the swamp, in the cardinals dashing across the blue sky that was revealed as the wintry white clouds withdrew. For the first time in far too long, he felt aware of the world, and then gratitude for it washed over him. The sounds of life poured back into his ears—the wood-and-metal rattle of a shay on the road, the slurred whine of a phoebe repeating its name. A song sparrow, with one brown spot like a smear on a painter’s smock, whistled grace notes and burst into liquid song. Henry heard a bluebird chortling and a robin belting out cheerily cheerily cheerily.
Alone at the pond, he admired the new form of a pine branch that had fallen into the water some time ago. Lathed by sun, wind, and current, it now lay clean and white in a new element, its upright former life forgotten.