The subtitle of Richardson's book is "How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives." So, one would expect this work, small though it is, to have something useful to say about grief and loss.
It doesn't.
Richardson has distilled three biographies of three individuals into this book, supposedly about loss and grief.
The distillation seems to be a little bit too condensed. In the piece on Emerson, we are told that his first wife died, and that he was strongly affected, but that is about it. The material that is provided in the book doesn't really indicate much of the effect that the death of Emerson's wife had on Emerson, we are simply told that it was extensive, and even that Emerson's health had suffered. We aren't even really told that his loss of health was as a result of the loss of his wife, just that he was in poor health. Then comes his trip to Europe, and his interest in naturalism (which, today, we would call science), and some of the people that he met, and then the publication of his book, "Nature." And that's about it.
We are told about the loss of Emerson's faith, following the death of his wife, but the evidence for this loss of faith, as expressed in the book, seems rather to indicate that Emerson's faith was rather ill informed to begin with. We are told of a piece of his writing that lists the shortcomings of Jesus, but those specific shortcomings, if one actually has read the gospels, are extremely easily refuted. I am forcibly reminded of the writings of another author, who said that Christianity had not been tried and found wanting, but found difficult, and therefore not tried.
This is to say, we are simply not given enough detail about Emerson, and Emerson's grief, to draw any particular conclusions about the quality of his eventual work, and from whence it arose.
It is hard to say that the book then moves on to Thoreau. The Emerson, Thoreau, and James families were closely connected. So there are still plenty of references to Emerson in the section on Thoreau.
It is equally hard to say that any of this, so far, is applicable to grief, generally. Yes, this is an interesting academic exercise in the development of an area of American philosophy, and philosophical thought. But the actual experience of grief seems to be missing. Indeed, in regards to Thoreau and the death of his brother, Thoreau seems to be making universal statements about grief within six weeks of the death. While everyone experiences grief and loss in their own way, six weeks does seem to be an extremely short space of time. Yes, in those days death from tetanus and scarlet fever were more common, whereas nowadays they would be mere medical inconveniences, but even so, death was not necessarily a daily occurrence, and a mere month and a half doesn't seem to provide enough time for anyone to deal with grief, and make profound and universal philosophical statements about grief, on that basis. Yes, C. S. Lewis wrote "A Grief Observed" while he was undergoing the grief, and ended the book, rather abruptly, while he was probably still in the grieving phase. But he was making observations, not universal philosophical statements about the nature of grief and how to approach it.
At this point there is an interesting fact to note in clumsiness in copy editing of the book. One particularly glaring error is the inconsistency of the name of Emerson's second wife. Is it Lydia? Or is it Lidian? With errors such as this, it becomes hard to trust some of the rest of the material in the book, even though there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of useful information in it at any rate.
Is the title misleading? Are there, in fact, three roads back, or is there merely one? A pleasant nature walk? Yes, nature can be very therapeutic. I yield to no one in my appreciation of forest bathing. It can be extremely helpful (unless you are terrified of being eaten by a bear. In my case, of course, being eaten by a bear sounds like a really good idea. But, I understand that other people might be somewhat frightened of it.)
In finishing with Thoreau (although it is hard to say that Richardson ever finishes with any of his subjects), he credits Thoreau with a clear exposition of the idea that death is a natural part of life, and that, therefore, there is, actually, no death. The matter of which individuals are made, may fail to contain the individuals anymore, but the matter remains, and gets reused in other life forms.
The problem is that this idea has already been formulated, and expressed, although in scientific terms, and perhaps with not so much poetry. This is, in fact, the first law of thermodynamics. Energy, and matter, can neither be created, nor destroyed, but only transformed.
And this idea, as a philosophy of life, only would appear to be acceptable, and a comfort, to those who already are willing to subsume the fate of the individual in that of the collective. The collective, the totality of all life, and all life forms, is more important than any individual. Yes, if you can accept this, love life in general, and are willing to accept that individuals die, then probably your attachment to any individual is weak anyway. And, as C. S. Lewis also said, later, the price of love (and in this case we are speaking of love for an individual), is grief. When the individuals dies, you grieve. That's the deal.
If you just love life, in broad, general, terms, then the death of an individual does not matter. You probably weren't too terribly attached to that individual, only the general expression of life that they represented. If they die, what does it matter? Life goes on. Their life doesn't, but life, in general, does. At least it does until a sufficiently large asteroid hits the earth, and wipes out all life. Of course it doesn't wipe out *all* life, it just wipes out life as we know it. Life, in broad and generic terms, seems to be, if not exactly resilient, at least capable of restarting. So, it really doesn't matter if life as we know it ends. Life in some other form will occur. In that case, the interest in ecology, and in balancing and supporting the so-called "natural" order, of which position Thoreau is often quoted as a prime exemplar, is pointless anyways. Why should we care about this particular ecology, and not another that will occur in another million, or billion, years, arriving along completely different paths?
All the same, I'm not really sure that this helps anyone with grief or dealing with loss. Indeed, the position I have just proposed is, in fact, seconded by William James, in the quote from his "The Will to Believe," which Richardson uses to start the section on William James. It says that if *this* life "be not a real fight, in which something is gained for the universe by success ..."
This would indicate that the life is, somewhat, separate from the universe: that an individual life has some meaning and merit quite apart from the universal generic life which inheres in the universe. Which would seem to fly in the face of what we've just had laid out by Emerson and Thoreau as a philosophical basis for, well, everything.
So, what the whole point of this book is, is rather confusing.
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