You must not only aim aright,
But draw the bow with all your might.
—Thoreau
Tuberculosis progressed in Thoreau until it was clear he was dying. He was forty-four, and just beginning to become a well-known writer. In the bold if morbid style of the time, people dropped by to visit him on his deathbed. It became a kind of tourist destination for the New England intelligentsia. Stories were told to illustrate his flinty character. God knows what he thought of these visits. He played his part. A few weeks before he died, a family friend asked him “how he stood affected toward Christ.” Thoreau answered, as reported later in The Christian Examiner, that “a snowstorm was more to him than Christ.”
His aunt Louisa asked him if he had made his peace with God, and he replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”
Parker Pillsbury, an abolitionist and family friend, dropped by near the end and said to him, “You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.”
Thoreau said, “One world at a time.”
Then he died, and for Emerson it was yet another in the series of catastrophic premature deaths that had struck his loved ones. Wife, child, friend. In reading Emerson’s eulogy for Thoreau, Frank could sense the intense care the old man had taken to give a fair and full portrait. “In reading Henry Thoreau’s journal, I am very sensible of the vigor of his constitution. That oaken strength which I noted whenever he walked, or worked, or surveyed wood-lots, Henry shows in his literary task. He has muscles, and ventures on and performs feats which I am forced to decline. In reading him, I find the same thought, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond, and illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generality. ’Tis as if I went into a gymnasium, and saw youths leap, climb, and swing with a force unapproachable—though their feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings and jumps.”
Emerson went on, “He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. He thought that, if waked up from a trance, in this swamp, he could tell by the plants what time of year it was within two days.
“To him there was no such things as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws.”
In short, a scientist.
But Emerson’s grief also had an edge to it, a kind of anger at fate which spilled over into frustration even with Thoreau himself:
“I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party.”
Whoah. That was pretty harsh, especially in a eulogy. And Frank saw reason to believe that this was not the first time Emerson had used the phrase—and that the first time it had been said right to Thoreau’s face. They had argued a lot, and about things they both thought mattered, like how to live in a nation where slavery was legal. And in Thoreau’s journal, whenever he was grumbling about the terrible inadequacies of friendship, it was pretty clear that he was usually complaining about Emerson. This was particularly true whenever he wrote about The Friend. It made sense, given the way they were; Emerson had a huge range of acquaintances and spread himself thin, while Thoreau had what Frank thought would now be called social anxieties, so that he relied heavily on a few people close to him. It would not have been easy for any friend to live up to his standards. Emerson said, “I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society.”
In any case they clashed, two strong thinkers with their own ideas, and so they saw less of each other, and Emerson disapproved of Thoreau’s withdrawal, and his endless botanizing.
Only in the privacy of his journal did Thoreau make his rebuttal to Emerson’s waspish accusation; this was why Frank thought Emerson had made it directly—perhaps even shouted it: he imagined the two men out in Emerson’s yard, Thoreau having dropped by without warning, withdrawn and contrary, headed into the woods, and the lonely old gabster hurt by this, and frustrated to see the potential great voice of the age go missing in the swamps—“You could be engineering all America, and yet off you go to be captain of a huckleberry party!”
Thoreau wrote: “To such a pass our civilization and division of labor has come, that A, a professional huckleberry-picker, has hired B’s field; C, a professed cook, is superintending the cooking of a pudding made of the berries; while Professor D, for which the pudding is intended, sits in his library writing a book. That book, which should be the ultimate fruit of the huckleberry field, will be worthless. There will be none of the spirit of the huckleberry in it. The reading of it will be a weariness to the flesh. I believe in a different kind of division of labor, and that Professor D should divide himself between the library and the huckleberry-field.”
Four days later, still nursing this riposte, he wrote:
“We dwellers in the huckleberry pastures are slow to adopt the notions of large towns and cities and may perchance be nicknamed huckleberry people.”
In the end, despite these spats, the two men were friends. They both knew that a twist of fate had thrown them into the same time and place, and they both treasured the contact. Thoreau wrote of his employer, teacher, mentor, friend:
“Emerson has special talents unequalled. The divine in man has had no more easy, methodically distinct expression. His personal influence upon young persons greater than any man’s. In his world every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take place, Man and Nature would harmonize.”
Interesting how even here Thoreau alluded to that source of conflict between them, the question of how to make an impact on the time. Meanwhile, Emerson thought Thoreau had disappeared into the woods and failed to live up to his promise; he could not foresee how widely Thoreau would eventually be read. It took many decades before Thoreau’s journals were published, and only then was his full accomplishment revealed, a very rare thing: the transcription of a mind onto the page, so that it was as if the reader became telepathic and could hear someone else thinking at last; and what thoughts! Of how to be an American, and how to see the land and the animals, and how to live up to the new world and become native to this place. His Walden was a kind of glorious distillate of the journal, and this book grew and grew in the American consciousness, became a living monument and a challenge to each generation in turn. Could America live up to Walden? Could America live up to Emerson? It was still an open question! And every day a new answer came. Frank, reading them in awe, having found the true sociobiology at last, a reading of the species that could be put to use, looked around him at all the ferals he lived among, at the polyglot conclave of all the peoples in the city; and he watched the animals coming back to the forest, and thought about how it could be; and he saw that it could happen: that they might learn how to live on this world properly, and all become huckleberry people at last.
Emerson, meanwhile, lived on. He carried the burden of grief and love, and his tribute to his young friend ended with the love and not the reproach, as it should be. “The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, not in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst of his broken task which none else can finish. But wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”
Frank tried to make one of those homes. He read Emerson and Thoreau. He forwarded the link to Emersonfortheday.com in all his e-mails, and posted printouts of various passages for the ferals to enjoy at the potlucks, and read passages aloud to people; and eventually a lot of his friends were also reading the site. Diane was a big fan, and she had gotten Phil Chase interested as well.
Phil’s hunt for America’s past, and an exemplary figure to give him inspiration and hope, was still focused on FDR, for obvious reasons; but he was capable of appreciating the New England pair as well, especially when Diane shoved a passage in front of his face at breakfast. It became a part of their morning routine. One day he laughed, beating her to the punch: “By God he was a radical! Here it is 1846, and he’s talking about what comes after they defeat slavery. Listen to this:
“ ‘Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances. Slavery and anti-slavery is the question of property and no property, rent and anti-rent; and anti-slavery dare not yet say that every man must do his own work. Yet that is at last the upshot.’ ”
“Amazing,” Diane said. “And now we’re here.”
Phil nodded as he sipped his coffee. “You gotta love it.”
Diane looked at him over the tops of her glasses. A middle-aged couple at breakfast, reading their laptops. “You’ve got to do it,” she corrected.
Phil grinned. “We’re trying, dear. We’re doing our best.”
Diane nodded absently, back to reading; she was, like Emerson, already focused on the next set of problems.
As Phil himself also focused, every day, day after day; his waking life was scheduled by the quarter hour. And some things got done; and despite all the chaos and disorder in America and the world, in the violent weather swings both climatic and political, the Chase administration was trying everything it could think to try, attempting that “course of bold and persistent experimentation” that FDR had called for in his time; and as a result, they were actually making some real progress. Phil Chase was fighting the good fight. And so naturally someone shot him.