American Philosophy (5 page)

Despite the bafflement—or perhaps because of it—James and his fellow researchers attended the séances and mind experiments that were conducted regularly through the 1880s and 1890s. Unlike most psychics, however, the members of the society documented and published their findings. None of these findings were anywhere near conclusive, but they did their part to push the boundaries of science, to explore an area that science couldn't quite explain.

James was hired to teach anatomy at Harvard in 1872, the same year he acquired
The Year-book of Spiritualism.
He was not satisfied as a physiologist. He complained that the factual, objective approach of the anatomist missed something crucial in its understanding of human nature. “[A] fact,” he wrote, “too often plays the part of a
sop
for the mind in studying these sciences. A man may take very short views, registering one fact after another, as one walks on stepping-stones, and never lose the conceit of his ‘scientific' function.” But for James something important was lost: the sense that a human being was more than a series of disparate material realities. A person is more than just a bundle of perceptions and nervous reactions. More than just a body that can be dissected and discarded. James hoped that there was something ethereal, transcendent—something even ghostly—that was free from the constraints of our physical lives. This led him to play with nitrous oxide in the early 1880s, in the belief that psychotropics might open portals to other realms of experience. It also led him back, repeatedly, to religious experience.

Later, James would come to have a very personal and more serious stake in the spiritualism of the late-Victorian era. In July 1885 his eighteen-month-old son, Herman, contracted whooping cough and died. The whole family was devastated. James wanted to believe that the boy was not fully gone. In September, James visited Leonora Piper, a medium who had become a Boston sensation for supposedly channeling spirits. James found Piper's “spirit control” sorely lacking, but he concluded that the woman might very well have what he called “supernormal powers.” At the end of his life, he begrudgingly admitted that evidence was “yet lacking to prove ‘spirit-return.'” He therefore “[left] the matter open” with the hope that science would one day have more than just an inkling of the supernatural, would understand what James called the “dramatic possibilities of nature,” the possibility that the deceased are never irretrievably gone. Under the watchful eyes of Agnes Hocking, as I read James's scribblings about ghosts and ancient Asian traditions, I wondered whether, for me, that day had finally come. Because William James was right in front of me exactly a century after his death.

*   *   *

Bunn took me home that evening in his blue Dodge pickup, though I have no recollection of what we discussed. The main thing I remember about the ninety-three-year-old is mistaking him for a ghost when he peeked his head into the front door of the library. In fact, he almost was. He died the next spring, before I could see him again.

As Bunn waited in the truck, as darkness crept in at the end of my first visit to West Wind, I scanned the shelves and with a growing sense of panic pulled only the books that simply had to be rescued: James's copies of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Berkeley, Condillac, Clarke, and Wolff. Some of them, like the first editions of Clarke and Wolff, were more than three hundred years old and were unlike anything I had ever put my hands on. “Vellum” is another name for skin—at one point, philosophy was bound up in the stuff. I reached down to pick up James's first edition of Samuel Clarke's
A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God
, published in 1705, and gently fingered its cold white surface as if it were a sacred relic. The term “philosophical corpus” had never made sense until now. I turned the book over. Tenderly. It was a little body: skin wrapped around something beautiful and inexplicable. Putting it under my arm, I turned to the back corners of the library. Tucked away on one of the back shelves was Josiah Royce's library: Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, Mill, Dilthey, Lotze, Tarde, Boole. These books were filled with marginalia. I took a quick look at one of Royce's jottings—something written in Greek about God and strife—but then grabbed the books that I could carry. I would think about marginalia later. This wasn't just any set of books. It was the bridge between European and American philosophy. That afternoon at dusk I had the unshakable sense that I was missing the most important part of West Wind, and over the course of three years I saw that this premonition was more correct than I could have known.

Instead of stealing them, I piled the books next to the
Century Dictionary
in the front entryway. That way they'd all be in one place when I came back for them. Then I remembered how easy trespassing was. They'd be in one place for me—or for anyone else who stumbled across the library. I moved them out of the front entrance and hid them in three rusty gray filing cabinets behind Hocking's enormous oak desk. Only I would find them there. By this point I'd wholly forgotten whom these books actually belonged to. The man from Berkeley responded to this convenient sense of oblivion by stealing them. I just hid them so that no one else could take them. An hour later, as Bunn and I bumped down the hill into the darkness below, I realized how foolish this was. There was absolutely no guarantee that I'd ever return to the library. Maybe the Hocking family would finally clean it out and send the file cabinets to the junkyard. Maybe they would never forgive my trespass. Maybe they'd put a gate at the bottom of Janus Road to deter snoops like me. Maybe another well-meaning American philosopher would find the library, but not the books. Maybe, on the drive back to my unhappy marriage, I'd get in the fatal crash I often imagined. Maybe I wouldn't be able to find my way back.

 

“PESTILENCE-STRICKEN MULTITUDES”

“Consciousness,” according to William James, “is in constant change.” Consciousness is not a unitary thing, but a process—a “stream,” as he calls it—that flows despite our best efforts to dam it up. I would have loved to stay in New Hampshire, to stop time on an afternoon in a forgotten library, but according to James, “no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before.” Things pass away, and you're often left casting about to recover them, even when you can't remember exactly what it is you're looking for.

Months had passed since my first visit to West Wind, and I wanted desperately to return, even if only in my head. “[W]e make search in our memory for a forgotten idea,” James instructs, “just as we rummage our house for a lost object … we visit what seems to us the probable neighborhood.” We look not for the memory itself, but for its known “associates.” One chilly March afternoon on my way home from Harvard Yard, I popped into a pastry shop called The Biscuit and waited for the bakers to bring out the
Schnecken
. As I waited, I found myself thinking about the words of the French Renaissance philosopher and essayist Michel Montaigne when he wrote of marriage: “Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.” Montaigne's birdcage made painful sense. Marriage was something entered into expectantly and then suffered begrudgingly, at least in my case. I was trapped—my only hope that some moment of transcendence or perfect recall might whisk me away. At last the
Schnecken
arrived—just like the ones at the nameless coffee shop in New Hampshire—perfect morsels of golden brown coated with a mix of pecans and syrup. Their buttery aroma and that of my not-so-fresh coffee wafted into my expectant nose. And then—nothing. The
Schnecken
didn't transport me back to the Hocking library. It didn't open some portal to escape the ennui of my urban academic life. As I left the shop, I tossed my half-eaten
Schnecken
into the trash, stopped at a bar, and took the most indirect route possible back to our apartment on Commercial Street.

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued that human beings, even when they fall in love, are a bit like porcupines. We crave intimacy, the kind of familiarity that temporarily quells our fears about being completely alone in the universe, but this closeness means that we invariably stab the ones we love. My marriage was a bit like that. From the beginning, when I met my wife in our first year at college, we both wanted, sometimes desperately, to be close. But we bungled it rather badly. We were tender, perhaps too tender, meaning that we were often moved to sympathy or compassion, to a state of vulnerability, like a brush burn that won't heal. We picked at each other for more than a decade. William Thackeray once claimed that “early love affairs ought to be strangled or drowned, like so many blind kittens.” Since
all
cats are born blind, the implication is pretty clear—young love rarely grows into something mature and healthy. I'd been a good son and a decent brother, but these experiences of love did pitifully little to prepare me for romance. After classes ended on Friday afternoons, she and I would go to the same family-style Chinese restaurant. We went so often that the owners got to know our names, our birthdays, our orders—moo goo gai pan, with chicken; mu shu vegetables, no oil. One evening, in a rare moment bordering on passion, we stopped on the sidewalk on our way out and had a non-perfunctory kiss. The owners rushed out the door after us. They were horrified to see a couple they'd long assumed were siblings kissing like that. We weren't siblings, we just acted the part—sniping, teasing, cutting each other down to size. I, at least, didn't have a clue how to be in erotic love. I often wished that someone would put us out of our misery. But no one did, so we groped through the next decade like two blind kittens.

*   *   *

Three weeks later, in the midst of yet another marital squabble brought on by my botched attempt to be romantic, Royce's marginalia from the library came back to me all at once:

συμβαίνει δ
'
Ἐμπεδοκλεῖ γε καὶ ἀφρονέστατον εἶναι τὸν θεόν˸ μόνος γὰρ τῶν στοιχείων ἓν οὐ γνωριεῖ
,
τὸ νεῖκος
,
τὰ δὲ θνητὰ πάντα˸ ἐκ πάντων γὰρ ἕκαστον
.

Something strange, I remembered, that Aristotle had said in
De Anima
about Empedocles's view of God and strife: “God is most foolish: for He is completely alone in not knowing the one thing that every mortal being knows, namely Strife.” Strife and doubt—they were what I felt my life had been all about for a long time. I had what Peirce called a “pillow-sharing acquaintance” with both of them; they were nightly companions. As I stretched out that evening and peered wide-eyed into the darkness—with the customary eighteen inches that separated me from my Strife on our king-size mattress—I couldn't help thinking that God was definitely not in bed with us. He had no idea about the mess our marriage had become. A life I wanted desperately to escape. The next morning I woke up, got into the car, and drove back to New Hampshire. I took no one. I told no one. I just left. It was the first free action—save for entering the library—I'd ventured in years.

The drive took much less time than it should have, and I tracked down Ken Schneider, the reverend at a local church, who took me back to West Wind. Schneider introduced me to the Hocking family—William's granddaughters, Jennifer, Jill, and Penny—and in the days that followed, they generously began to include me in their hopes and plans to save the library. The Hocking sisters had much in common: their graying hair, their lack of makeup and other pretenses, their modesty, their frugality, their respect for all things artistic, their fear of change, and their obviously complex love of one another. But each of them was obsessed with a different aspect of West Wind.

Jennifer was most worried about its ecosystem, so worried that I sometimes felt strange talking to her about the books. She was adamant that the wild acreage should remain untouched. I imagined that she secretly considered the books to be a burial ground for an untold number of trees. Jill, by my estimation the most bookish of the three, was concerned about the intellectual legacy of West Wind. Somehow she'd cultivated the false belief that she wasn't smart enough to be a philosopher, which she must have picked up as a result of being surrounded by her grandfather and father and a bunch of other male philosophers when she was growing up. But she had dreams of opening the estate as an artists' retreat modeled after the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences at Middlebury College. Penny had more modest goals: She wanted to sort the family heirlooms and fix the roofs that might protect them. She was the keeper of the Hocking-O'Reilly family history, a history so complex it would boggle my mind for years to come. Over a lunch of tea cakes and mini-sandwiches, overlooking the Presidential Range, we struck upon a rescue plan for West Wind. I would work at the library on weekends through the coming fall. The cataloging and transcription of the marginalia would take months, even years, and I wanted to make sure we didn't miss anything. Jennifer, the de facto groundskeeper, would let me into the building (or, as it turned out, give me the key). I'd reach out to a number of university libraries to see if they might agree to house the collection—the University of Southern Maine was right down the road and seemed like a natural spot.

The sisters told me that they were surprised and relieved that someone, a philosopher no less, was interested in caring for the books. Proximity sometimes precludes perspective: They'd lived at West Wind for so long that the place had become ordinary to them, and they were genuinely shocked that anyone would be excited about the library. I, on the other hand, was shocked that no scholar had gotten there first; the archived correspondence of William Ernest Hocking looks like one grand index of twentieth-century intellectual life, with more than seven thousand correspondents in total. He was good friends with James, Royce, Palmer, Husserl, Robert Frost, Alfred North Whitehead, Richard Feynman, Dean Acheson, and Bertrand Russell (maybe “friend” isn't the right way to describe the notoriously abrasive Russell, but they were close). And he was better than good friends with the Nobel Prize–winning author Pearl S. Buck. So, yes, I was interested in West Wind.