American Philosophy (29 page)

The will roll'd onward, like a wheel

In even motion, by the Love impell'd,

That moves the sun in heav'n and all the stars.

It is the best ending one can hope for. Freedom and love. Perhaps not to have and to hold, but rolling onward.

*   *   *

We were married in the fall of 2011, and Carol got pregnant on our honeymoon. “Are you a man
entitled
to wish for a child?” Friedrich Nietzsche asks. “Are you the victorious one, the self-conqueror, the commander of your senses, the master of your virtues?… Or is it the animal and need that speak out of your wish? Or loneliness? Or lack of peace with yourself?” Or, one wants to add, all of the above? As fathers, we're expected to be “self-conquerors,” to have ourselves fully in order before we start giving directions to children. That might be a reasonable expectation, but one that nobody seems able to meet. After my time at West Wind, I expected that parenting, like falling in love, meant never again having yourself in perfect order, but facing the mysteries of intimacy as best you can. As a young child, I had feared my father, and years later, I feared becoming him. But in the end, he helped me learn very important lessons about being a parent—and about being alive. He taught me that William James was probably right about the meaning of life: It is up to the liver.

As we waited for our daughter, Becca, to arrive, the Hockings decided to donate part of the library to the University of Massachusetts Lowell. On the day we were to move the books, Carol was still enduring the trials of the first trimester, and she decided to stay home. So I picked up a U-Haul with my buddy Mark, and we slowly clunked up the hill to the library. The Hocking sisters met us in the driveway, and we made a last pass through the first floor before caravanning out to North Conway Dry Storage. Jill was excited: The thought of the books being used by real, live philosophers was thrilling to a woman who could have easily been one herself. Jennifer was relieved: She'd never felt at ease with the books, and a small part of her, I think, was happy to see them go. Penny wept. The books were the heart and soul of this place and—although they had to be preserved—their removal would destroy an essential part of West Wind.

Mark drove the U-Haul, and I hopped into Jennifer's beat-up Saturn along with her sisters. As we pulled out of the driveway and made our way over to the storage locker to load the books, I asked the question that had bothered me from the start:

“Why was this place called West Wind?”

Penny reassured me that my guess about the Shelley poem was a decent one—“Ode to the West Wind,” the destroyer and preserver. I hunkered down in the backseat to consider the strange paradox of the poem:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Penny cleared her throat in the front seat. She wasn't finished. She'd just paused to think.

“I could be wrong,” she said, “but I also think it was the nickname of my grandmother, Agnes. They used to call her West Wind.”

 

EPILOGUE: THE CULT OF THE DEAD

Today, a few hundred of the Hocking books, the ones the appraiser managed to assess in his two-day visit to West Wind, are kept in a room in the archives of the O'Leary Library at UMass. It's pretty isolated, but at least it's dry, warm, and rodent-free. I visit them often, under fluorescent lights. Occasionally I take my students. It is not exactly Houghton Library: There are no watchful librarians or even proper tables, just shelves and books. My students don't seem to mind. In fact, they seem to like the cramped and understated intimacy of packing themselves between the shelves. At one point I made them wear gloves, but eventually I decided that any book that survived at West Wind could probably be handled with bare hands. I just tell them to be careful, and they are. I still think of the books at West Wind as I first found them—priceless but vulnerable, a bit like life itself.

*   *   *

If you enter Sever Gate on the east side of Harvard Yard and walk toward Holden Chapel, you'll notice a boxy building to your left, which houses the philosophy department. This is Emerson Hall, named after that sage of Concord. On the second floor you'll find the department office and Robbins Library. Reginald Robbins was a student of James and Royce. At the back of Robbins Library is a broom closet that doubles as a little-used storage space. In the midst of finding West Wind, I'd found this broom closet. It was filled with cleaning supplies, no small amount of dust, and the single most moving piece of writing I've ever read. At one point someone had been similarly moved, and had decided to frame it, but in subsequent years the frame had been wedged between the waste bin and the file cabinet. I'd pried it out far enough to see the words written on the bottom of the now-yellowing piece of paper inside the frame:

“Last written words of Josiah Royce…”

I pulled the frame out of its hiding place, and I couldn't help thinking how ironic it was that Royce's dying words ended up in a janitor's closet and Hocking's had been buried at West Wind, both signs that philosophy had taken an unfortunate turn away from the existential problems that these philosophers had found so compelling: how to live a creative, meaningful life in the face of our inevitable demise. As I read the scribbled writing inside the picture frame, I wasn't surprised to see Royce attempting to cope with the tragic one last time in his final hours. Royce's penmanship declined in his later life, and by his final year, 1916, it was almost illegible. But this note was surprisingly clear and deliberate:

Among the motives that have made the religious life of humanity intense, endlessly disposed to renew its youth despite all its disillusionments and unfailingly precious despite all of its changes and disappointments is the motive expressed in one of the oldest and newest of cults—the cult of the dead …

This rivals my first encounter with West Wind as the most haunting moment I've ever had as a philosopher. But it's also one of the most profound. I knew what Royce was talking about, at least intellectually. The “cult of the dead” was a reference to a very old institution that sought to memorialize and counteract the tragedy of human finitude. It's sometimes referred to as the “ancestor cult,” in which members spend their lives working to keep the dead alive, at least in memory. The ancient Celts had one, the Egyptians too. Royce hoped that such a cult could survive the forward-looking tendencies of modernity. Hocking had created a monument to this cult at West Wind.

If the ultimate tragedy of life can be summed up in Ecclesiastes's suggestion that “all is vanity,” it was the job of the cult of the dead to respectfully, enduringly disagree. The cult commemorated the dead and spoke for them long after they were gone. It affirmed what most of us wish someone would say about us when we die: that we are still relevant, that we still matter.

On that afternoon in the broom closet, I wiped off the dust obscuring the rest of Royce's words:

This cult has survived countless changes of opinion. It will survive countless transformations of belief such as the future may have in store for us. Its spirit will grow … So long as love and memory and record and monument keep the thought of our dead near to our lives and hearts, so long as … the spirit of brotherhood enables us to prize what we owe to those who have lived and died for us, the cult of the dead will be an unfailing source to us of new and genuinely religious life.

As I sat on the floor of the closet, cleaning the rest of the frame and thinking about the library at West Wind, it could have been easy to think that Royce had been dead wrong. We die, and despite the heroism of our final words, our remains end up at West Wind or in some hidden closet, wedged between a trash can and a file cabinet. All of this is true, but I now have some sense of how sacred these last remains can be.

West Wind taught me many things. About longevity in the face of destruction, about dealing with loss, about love and freedom, but also about the discipline of philosophy. Philosophy, and the humanities more generally, once served as an effective cult of the dead—documenting, explaining, and revitalizing the meaning and value of human pursuits. It tried to figure out how to preserve what is noble and most worthy about us. At its best, philosophy tried to explain why our lives, so fragile and ephemeral, might have lasting significance. In Hocking's words in
The Meaning of Immortality
, we must learn to “treat the present moment as if it were engaged in business allotted to it by that total life which stretches indefinitely beyond.” Royce's son Stephen had written an inscription at the bottom of his father's note: “Last written words of Josiah Royce found on his desk after his death never completed.” Never completed. At least that is the hope—when it comes to both the cult of the dead and philosophy's dying words.

*   *   *

In 1850 John Hayward published a collection of sketches from his time at Harvard entitled
College Scenes.
One of these scenes is of a darkly lit room filled with skeletons and a couple of young pranksters with lanterns. One student holds the light while the other tries to make love to a corpse. At the bottom of the sketch, a shaky hand had scrawled, “A Midnight Foray into the Medical Room at Holden Chapel.”

When William James addressed his audience at Holden in 1895 to wrestle with the question “Is Life Worth Living?” he was undoubtedly aware of the macabre “forays” that had transpired beneath his feet (pictures from the 1890s show what look like human ribs stolen from anatomy labs and hung from the mantels of student dormitory rooms). Holden was renovated a century later, at which point the construction crew unearthed a dry well filled with human remains—after the college students were finished with their necrophilic pranks, the bones had been pitched down the hole and forgotten.

When I spent time at Holden in 2008, I was obsessed with the bones—how easily, abruptly, meaninglessly life could end. James was not blind to this possibility. However, he wasn't resigned to it either. To the question of life's worth in the face of its abiding difficulties, James responds: Maybe. Maybe life is a hollow waste, but maybe it could, even in the face of inevitable destruction, be something more. James suggests that we stake our lives on that chance. “For such a half-wild, half-saved universe,” James contends, “our nature is adapted.”

Anatomy classes are no longer held at Holden. Today it houses the Harvard Glee Club. In the fall, as the ground grows cold and the days short, the choir begins to practice the “Gloria” from William Byrd's
Mass for Three Voices.
The small building practically quivers with the sound.

In the medieval era it was not uncommon to bury the bones of the dead in buildings—for example, in the floors and walls of chapels across the British Isles. It is believed that these remains not only served as safeguards against demons but also had a more practical function: They were good for the acoustics. The songs of the living, reverberating through these dead remains, could escape the earthen walls and begin their ascent. These chapels would ring with the strange mix of the tragic and the spiritual—with the perfect pitch of a
maybe
.

 

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SUGGESTED READING

Addams, J.
Newer Ideals of Peace
. New York: Macmillan, 1911.

______
. Twenty Years at Hull-House
. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

______
.
Democracy and Social Ethics
. Edited by C. H. Seigfried. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Alexander, T. M.
John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling
. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Anderson, D. R.
Creativity and the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce
. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1987.

______
.
Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture
. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006.

Anderson, D. R., and C. R. Hausman.
Conversations on Peirce: Reals and Ideals
. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

Anderson, D. R., and C. S. Peirce.
Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce
. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1995.

Barzun, J.
A Stroll with William James
. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.

Bernstein, R. J.
John Dewey
. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966.

______
.
Praxis and Action
. London: Duckworth, 1971.

Boisvert, R. D.
Dewey's Metaphysics
. New York: Fordham University Press, 1988.

Boydston, J.
John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924
. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–83.

Buck, P. S.
The Good Earth
. New York: Washington Square Press, 1931.

______
.
East Wind: West Wind: The Saga of a Chinese Family
. New York: Open Road Media, 2012.

______
.
The Goddess Abides: A Novel
. New York: Open Road Media, 2013.

Carus, P.
Buddhism and Its Christian Critics
. Chicago: The Open Court, 1897.

Cavell, S.
Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005.

______
.
Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006.

Child, L. M.
The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations
. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1835.