Читать книгу Restless Souls - Leigh Eric Schmidt - Страница 12

CHAPTER TWO

SOLITUDE

I SAT IN MY SUNNY DOORWAY from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery,” Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) wrote of an experience at Walden Pond in the mid–1840s, “amidst the pine and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness.” Though “naturally no hermit” and happily entertaining various visitors in his makeshift home in the woods, Thoreau pronounced a distinct and enduring blessing upon isolation through his two-year experiment twenty miles outside Boston and a mile or so from the village of Concord. “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time,” he confessed. “To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” His commitment to simplicity and seclusion hardly made for loneliness or melancholy. He said that only once during his sojourn, and only “for an hour” as a result of “a slight insanity in my mood,” had he felt “the least oppressed by a sense of solitude.” His was not a misanthropic withdrawal from friendship and society, but a spiritual retreat into a natural world of revelatory sounds and seasons. The question about solitude that Thoreau put to himself and to his age was ultimately one of contemplative discernment: “What do we want most to dwell near to?”¹

Beginning his sojourn in the woods on Independence Day in 1845, Thoreau gave practical embodiment to Transcendentalist self-reliance and religious aspiration, to “the solitude of soul” that his friend Emerson, fourteen years his senior, had already praised as a desideratum in his private journal and in his manifesto Nature (1836). “I got up early and bathed in the pond,” Thoreau wrote of his morning ablutions. “That was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.” He reenacted in the glow of the sunrise his desire for casting off slumber and for awakening into “a poetic or divine life.” “To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?” His devout habits at Walden were anything but ethereal, enveloping his body, dress, food, and furnishings, which Thoreau imagined–loosely, to be sure–as a “Hindoo” discipline: “Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles…. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.” The angular hermit imagined an ascetic path of awakening; his exploration of the solitary life was a quest for a purity of soul and body.²

Thoreau devoted a distinct chapter to “Solitude” in Walden and at another point imagined a dialogue between a Hermit and a Poet, which allowed him to bring his spiritual and artistic sensibilities into a direct, if ironic, exchange. The Poet, rustling through the woods, interrupts the Hermit in the midst of “serious meditation” and tries to draw him off in a diversion. The Hermit initially resists and tries to recover his frame of mind and its “budding ecstasy,” but finds that his thoughts have left no trail. “I was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear my thoughts will not come back to me,” the Hermit laments. Resigning himself to his lost opportunity for heightened spiritual awareness, the Hermit goes off with the Poet to fish. Confessedly, fishing in itself evoked mixed feelings for Thoreau; it was, by turns, an instinctual means of subsistence and sport, an offense to his “higher” inclinations to abstain from all “animal food,” and an emblem of meditative retreat. Fishing was potentially redeemable from the uncleanness of killing when viewed as a spiritual practice. It was for some, Thoreau surmised, “a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their bibles.”³

Henry David Thoreau led the way in the American reevaluation of the spiritual potential of solitude. (Concord Free Public Library.)

Thoreau's hermitage at Walden Pond constitutes no doubt the most famous American exploration of solitude. “If any American,” a contemporary commented a few years after Thoreau's death, “deserves to stand as a representative of the experience of recluseness, Thoreau is the man.” Courting notoriety, the Concord hermit created religious controversy in seeking his inspiration primarily beyond the pale of the churches and its saints. He set up the Buddha especially as a sign of his desire to move beyond the usual ligatures of New England Protestantism and to question standing religious authorities: “I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.” If Thoreau staked the originality of his religious journey upon the apparent confluence of the Concord and the Ganges, he still wrote in the shadow of the Bible and the church. His own solitude, however distinctive and celebrated, represented a wider cultural convergence and realignment, a crossing from Christian exemplars of holiness to more diffuse sources and inspirations. It took a lot of cultural work to get to Thoreau's Walden, let alone to produce William James's eccentric seeker for whom “at any time the word hermit was enough to transport him.”⁴

Walden, with its powerful evocation of Thoreau's pond-side hermitage, emerged as the classic text in the Transcendentalist reconfiguration of solitude. (Concord Free Public Library.)

Thoreau's experiment occupies a critical juncture in the long and rich history of the solitude of hermits, one of the romantic crossroads in the making of American spirituality. Transcendentalists were those strange philosophers, the historian Henry Adams wryly remarked in their wake, who “sought conspicuous solitudes” and who “looked out of windows and said, ‘I am raining.’” Adams may have found Transcendentalism's attention-grabbing hermits “unutterably funny,” but the movement's rise was crucial to the reconfiguring of the anchorite's practice. Thoreau and company revalued solitude, opening it outward from specifically Christian forms of retired devotion into more diffuse forms of aspiration, religious and artistic. “Spirituality did ever choose loneliness,” the second-generation Transcendentalist William Rounseville Alger (1822–1905) declared in his formative work The Solitudes of Nature and of Man in 1866. “For there the far, the departed, the loved, the unseen, the divine, throng freely in, and there is no let or hindrance to the desires of our souls.” Solitude, in effect, underwent a post-Protestant transformation in which the search for isolation and retreat became the spiritual motto for more than one generation of seekers. Thoreau and his circle managed to leave a lasting mark on American imaginings of spirituality, evident in a long train of figures from John Muir and John Burroughs to Thomas Merton and Annie Dillard who made the solitary life an object of meditation and desire. As Barbara Erakko Taylor cheerily explains of her “hunger for unbroken solitude” in Silent Dwellers (1999), “We all have idealized, even romantic, ideas of a hermit. Mine had a self-denying, Thoreau-like quality: a rustic cabin with wood furniture.”⁵

The Encyclopædia Britannica of 1797 defined the hermit or eremite as “a devout person retired into solitude, to be more at leisure for prayer and contemplation.” It took the early Christian history as its baseline, reckoning the story from fourth-century accounts of St. Paul the Hermit and St. Anthony; indeed, it had no other frame of reference beyond these desert fathers and their austere devotions. That starting point was hardly one of unambiguous faith and heroic asceticism for wary Protestants and equally wary philosophers of the Enlightenment. In his famed history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), Edward Gibbon portrayed the “perpetual solitude” of anchorites as the product of a “savage enthusiasm.” “These unhappy exiles from social life were impelled by the dark and implacable genius of superstition,” Gibbon wrote with horror of the spreading influence of these ascetic ideals throughout the empire and the peril they had posed to civil society and its manlier virtues. The solitary life of the hermit was a matter of “blind submission” to ecclesial tyranny and the very opposite of “the freedom of the mind” to which Enlightenment learning aspired. These supposed saints of the desert had their lives “consumed in penance and solitude, undisturbed by the various occupations which fill the time, and exercise the faculties, of reasonable, active, and social beings.” The challenge that these Christian recluses posed to pagan virtues made them potentially ominous signs of decline and ruin. Gibbon's suspicion of hermits, in short, was akin to Henry Coventry's contempt for mystics.⁶

In a new nation steeped in the joined dicta of Protestantism and the Enlightenment, such fears of civic and religious deformity necessarily haunted American thinking on solitude. The entry on hermits and anchorites in the first edition of the Encyclopedia Americana (1829–1833) had some of Gibbon's vituperative tone: “the spirit of retirement and self-torment raged like an epidemic among the early Christians”; “the melancholy of solitude” had often degenerated into “fanatical excesses” and “moral insanity.” In 1850 Henry Ruffner, one of a venerable troupe of Protestant college presidents in antebellum America, took up the history of “the primitive monks and hermits” as a cautionary tale in two volumes. Depicting the rise of early Christian asceticism as a descent into ever “deeper and drearier solitudes,” Ruffner saw these “saintly savages” of the desert as men of wild superstitions about demons, angels, poverty, and sexuality. The hermits, already perverse in their lewd chastity, gave way to the still greater depravity of monks who underwrote “the monstrous system of Popish tyranny and persecution” and who served as a warning to any professed Protestants for whom High Church Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism offered even a remote temptation.⁷

In the nineteenth-century Protestant imagination, the ancient desert fathers seemed at best exotic in their saintly warfare upon temptations of flesh and spirit. In Hours with the Mystics (1856), one of Robert Alfred Vaughan's interlocutors remarked that she had been “looking at the pictures in Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art, of those strange creatures, the hermit saints–the Fathers of the desert.” Vaughan's Protestant discussants were both appalled by the “wonderworking pretensions” of these sanctified anchorites and yet drawn into the tormenting visions of St. Anthony and the rest, which were “not without grandeur.” For refined Protestant audiences, the desert hermits of Egypt remained present especially through their iconography, an inherited part of nineteenth-century fine arts. The book that inspired Vaughan's exchange, Anna Jameson's guide to sacred art, was especially popular; it went through multiple editions after its initial appearance in 1848 and contained numerous images of the hermit saints in all their archaic difference. Their oddities, in other words, were something to examine in well-illustrated books or on the walls of museums, not an example to imitate.⁸

Even when not focused on the corruption of Christianity that the perverse desire for the hermit's cell had precipitated, evaluations of solitude often remained admonitory. “In solitude the heart withers,–God meant it for social life,” the Reverend William Peabody preached in a sermon published in 1831. An enemy of social benevolence and domestic happiness, solitude produced religious presumption, not mutual regard. “It is less a virtue than a sin,” Peabody concluded. It was seen as one more solvent that corroded civil society and highlighted the danger of new democratic freedoms turning into self-loving vices. The American experiment with freedom and equality, Alexis de Tocqueville warned in his classic commentary Democracy in America (1835–1840), was begetting “a novel expression” of “individualism.” The new democracy, however robust, remained vulnerable; it seemed to throw each citizen “back forever upon himself alone” and “to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” From the vantage point of a fragile republic, solitude appeared the very antithesis of a religiously cohesive nation.⁹

The popular tales that circulated in the first half of the nineteenth century about more recent hermits reinforced the low and fearful standing of solitude as destitution. In the lore of contemporary wonders and marvels, hermits were known far more for lost love and unredeemed suffering than spiritual potential. Telling in this regard was Life and Adventures of Robert Voorhis, the Hermit of Massachusetts, Who Has Lived 14 Years in a Cave, Secluded from Human Society (1829), a narrative of a former slave from Princeton, New Jersey, who resided in a “solitary hermitage” close to Providence, Rhode Island. An object of local curiosity, Voorhis was thought by many to be a melancholy misanthrope, but the narrator revealed him to have been a cruelly mistreated slave, separated at age four from his mother and sister and as a young man from his wife and two children. The solitude of his “rude cell” was, Voorhis reported to his inquirer, a deliberate response to “the bitter cup of my afflictions!—afflictions which had more or less attended me through life!” To some, from the outside, the hilltop retreat might seem “a most romantic situation” as it supplied the hermit's simple wants from “the bountiful hand of nature,” but the narrator quickly disposed of that idyll. Living in a dark, cold, cramped cave was not a resource for practical Christian faith; instead, only a hope for the ultimacy of divine justice sustained Voorhis, as did the principle “that human beings, whatever might be their complexion[,] were all created equally free.” These were not religious and political convictions that he garnered from solitude, but ones he held on to despite his sorrow and separation. The life of Robert the Hermit was intended to inspire others not to devotional imitation, but to feelings of “sympathy for distress.” His narrative was expressly published as a project of benevolence to raise funds to improve his condition and to further the antislavery cause.¹⁰

The woes of Robert Voorhis, a former slave turned solitary, exemplified the ways in which the hermit was presented as a tragic and forlorn figure in antebellum America. (Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.)

Other hermit narratives of the period told similarly forlorn stories of loss. John Conrad Shafford, whose tale of woe was published in 1841, spent his last fifty years living “a secluded and lonely life.” He was driven to it through “being deprived of an only child, a beloved daughter,” who was taken captive by Indians at age fifteen and who died “a wretched victim of their barbarity.” Three months later he was “bereaved of my wife” as well, and so, like Robert, this “Dutch Hermit” had chosen “solitary retreat” as a result of “heavy afflictions.” As one spiritual guide of the period put it, “The grieved heart, like the wounded deer, retreats into solitude to bleed.”¹¹

Ruinous calamity also marked the life of Sarah Bishop, popularly known as the Hermitess. (Firestone Library, Princeton University.)

Similarly tragic was Sarah Bishop's story. During the American Revolution, British soldiers plundered her family's home on Long Island, and she “was made a victim of one of those demoniac acts, which in peace are compensated by the gibbet, but which, in war, embellish the life of the soldier.” Bishop fled the shame of her rape and apparently lived in a desolate cave for most of the next three decades. Both Shafford and Bishop were reputed to take consolation in their gloom from reading precious (if tattered) copies of the Bible, and so both could be pictured as looking beyond this vale of tears to “a brighter and happier existence.” In neither case was solitude thought to be the vehicle for spiritual attainment, however; instead, it was an isolated state of grief that was partially assuaged through the otherworldly vision of the Scriptures. When Walt Whitman actually met “a real hermit” in “one of my rambles,” he projected only heartache upon him and his “lonesome spot,” remarking that the man “did not unbosom his life, or story, or tragedy.”¹²

The Protestant suspicion of monasticism and the pained commiseration of reform-minded benefactors were less than promising bases for Thoreau's revaluing of solitude. Pity and Protestant polemic, however, were not the only responses that hermits evoked in the early republic; they also attracted journalistic sensation and touristic attention. Hundreds had apparently sought out Robert the Hermit, hoping to penetrate the veil of his mysterious isolation and gratify their curiosity, and Sarah Bishop, likewise, attracted those looking for a good excursion, a double marvel as “a woman hermit.” At the end of one pamphlet from 1815 titled “Remarkable Discovery of an American Hermit,” Captain James Buckland even offered to provide “particular directions for any one to go and find the Hermit, and satisfy his own curiosity” about this mournful soul and his hidden cave. The architect Harriet Morrison Irwin in her fictional tale The Hermit of Petræa had her title character remark that if Yankee travelers were to get wind of “the charmed word hermit…I should soon find myself driven out of this dear retreat of mine by sight-seers and sensation-mongers.” Not surprisingly, one of Thoreau's visitors at Walden suggested that he needed to have on display in his cabin “a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White Mountains.” Would solitude be solitude without a log of witnesses, travelers, and guests? Would solitude be recognizable without intrusion and interruption?¹³

So travel, voyeurism, and curiosity provided a point of departure toward Thoreau's Transcendentalist crossroads. The hermit's cave or cabin was an attraction that carried the sensational appeal of secretiveness and mystery. One of the many nineteenth-century loners of the Adirondacks, a region rich in its interweaving of travel guides and hermit lore, doubled in the summer as a concessionaire for tourists. That did not disqualify Stewart Wilson from his reputation as the Hermit of Sacandaga Park–an embodiment of an aimless rusticity that only added to his allure for visitors. The Adirondacks, to be sure, became one of the great and lasting sources of tales about hermits and hermitages, and the park still retains that image. It is a place where hermits lurk on the edges of a visitor's peregrinations and imagination. As Sue Halpern writes at the opening of Migrations to Solitude: The Quest for Privacy in a Crowded World (1992), “Deep among the birch, some miles back from my house in the Adirondack Mountains, is a cabin where a man is said to have lived alone for a quarter century, maybe longer. Then one day, the story goes, he walked out of the woods and disappeared.” In writing her own meditations on solitude, she looked for that man in prisons and monasteries to talk to him about his experience “as a physical fact,” but, in a poetic deferral that only heightens the air of mystery and desire, she (of course) never finds him.¹⁴