Newspaper Article

EMERSON IN HIS PRIME `IN THE APPARENT CHAOS OF NATURE HE FOUND ORDER ABOUNDING

Reviewed by John McAleer, director of the Thoreau Society author of "Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter"

1995

Overview

First, Thoreau-\"A Life of the Mind\" (1986). Now, Emerson-\"The Mind on Fire.\" Never mistake Robert Richardson's intentions. He is not making mere courtesy calls on illustrious Concordians. He comes as a headhunter, determined to take possession of the intellects of his subjects. His goal as a biographer is not to glamorize but to anatomize, and if his Emerson is more accessible than his Thoreau, that betokens not alteration of method but the contrasting temperaments of his subjects. Emerson was more open emotionally, more social. To give the pertinent years a frame, Richardson tells us that Emerson, a year after his young bride's death in 1831, came to terms with his loss by opening her coffin and viewing her moldering remains. Twenty-five years later, he replenished his awareness of the transiency of human existence by opening the coffin of his \"hyacinthian\" son, Waldo, dead then 10 years. With these coffin episodes Richardson recollects Melville's Ishmael, saved by coffins at beginning and end of his voyage. Emerson, who grew up in the heart of Boston, was out of college before, at Aunt Mary [Moody Emerson]'s behest, he thought of consorting with Nature. He at once made amends. At the heart of his first book, \"Nature,\" Richardson finds the \"closely observed natural world.\" Yet, soon after, we find Emerson deploring the scant harvest of ideas-\"the poor chupes and berries I find in my basket after endless and aimless rambles in woods and pastures\"-that his pursuit of Nature had brought him. This dearth did not persist. In the apparent chaos of Nature he found order abounding. Fact and observation, opening his mind to science, anchored his thought in the real world.

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC