Tears of Things: Two Books on Mourning

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife Ellen died of tuberculosis when she was 19, a year and four months after marrying her husband, now 27, a junior Unitarian minister. Emerson (1803–1882) was undone by the loss, paralyzed by a “miserable apathy.” For more than a year he walked every day from his home in Boston to her grave in Roxbury. Fourteen months after her death he took the extraordinary step of opening her coffin. “What exactly met his eye that day cannot have been pleasant, but he had to see for himself,” writes the distinguished biographer Robert D. Richardson in his often challenging, posthumously published book Three Roads Back. Richardson writes with apparent approval of Henry David Thoreau’s conviction that the “individual may die” but “the materials that make up the individual do not” — a view that, “if one can grasp it and hold it, means that in a general and communal sense, there is no death.” Perhaps. But such an understanding of our individual end seems rather dehumanizing, does it not? Yes, we are part of nature, but we are also in some inexplicable way set apart from nature. And that, to coin a phrase, is usually the rub.

Richardson, who died in 2020 at the age of 86, was a prize-winning author of capacious intellectual biographies of Emerson, Thoreau (1817–1862), and William James (1842–1910). His topic in this short book is human resilience in the face of a loved one’s passing. Richardson urges readers to approach Three Roads Back as “documentary biography” in which the stories are told using the subjects’ own letters and journals. Emerson and Thoreau were, of course, major figures in New England Transcendentalism, a quasi-pantheistic faith influenced by English Romanticism and German Idealism. James, a philosopher and psychologist, is best known for his books Pragmatism, The Will to Believe, and The Varieties of Religious Experience. As Richardson suggests, James’s understanding of “truth . . . not as an abstract or absolute quality, but a process,” has influenced many contemporary philosophers.

In Richardson’s telling, each of these thinkers offers impressive and useful examples of the difficulty but also of the power of the human will in the face of unimaginable loss. Such perseverance, he writes, is to be found in a “disindividualized” understanding of human nature, one that discards an anthropocentric view of life and the world for an eco-centric one. “Resilience is not idiosyncratic but something held in common with all other people and all other forms of life,” he writes. He hopes readers will forge a “personal, even a sympathetic connection” with these foundational American thinkers. Whether that is possible depends on how sympathetic and cogent one finds their thinking. Emerson and Thoreau preach essentially the same gospel, while the sources of resilience for James lie less in Nature with a capital N and more in the attitude one adopts toward life’s inevitabilities and mysteries.

As Emerson “had to see Ellen’s remains for himself, so he now realized he had to think for himself as well,” Richardson surmises, although the logic of that equation is not clear. Many people, one imagines, have had similar experiences and yet found solace in inherited beliefs and practices. Contemplating Yorick’s skull, Hamlet failed to have such a revelation regarding the primacy of individual autonomy. In any event, Emerson’s path back from Ellen’s death was a tortuous one. Thoreau’s recovery from the sudden death of an older brother was much quicker, which is not surprising given what seemed to have been his essentially narcissistic character. James’s mourning on the death of the youthful Minny Temple, a charismatic and much adored female cousin, seems to have been less overt, since it occurred during a period of his own existential struggles. Richardson notes, however, that her death coincided with the emergence of the “central insight” behind James’s philosophy, “the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world.”

Soon after Ellen’s death Emerson resigned from Boston’s Second Church and left traditional creedal Christianity. “I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican Astronomy to have made the theological scheme of Redemption absolutely incredible,” he confessed to his congregation. He would find a new faith in the workings of Nature, even praising his friend Thomas Carlyle’s celebration of the “majestic beauty of the laws of decay.”

Emerson subsequently experienced an epiphany while visiting the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where he is transformed by the cohesion and beauty of nature as apprehended by human reason. This “connection with the natural world,” Richardson explains, dispelled Emerson’s despair. He saw a way forward toward meaningful endeavors in what was then called Natural Philosophy. “It is the effect of science to explain man to himself,” Emerson writes in his 1836 book Nature. “The knowledge of all the facts of all the laws of Nature will give man his true place in the system of beings.”

Now that the Copernican universe has been superseded by much stranger cosmological realities, one might think Emerson was enamored less of science than of scientism. Or as the novelist Marilynne Robinson has written, “space, time, light, gravity — all of these elude understanding, radically and profoundly.” Nature remains as unfathomable as the fact of being itself.

Any “conceptual” understanding of death is also radically and profoundly elusive, or so the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear argues in Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. As the book’s title indicates, the meaning of death and acts of mourning must be approached through the imagination — in ritual, art, and stories. We cannot fully know what we are dealing with when confronted by these elemental realities. Pretending otherwise is self-delusion.

“What is it for us to have a past? What is it for us to be dead? These are not just puzzles that we may never solve. They arrive in the manner of anxious confrontation,” Lear writes in psychoanalytical parlance. “If the concept death is part of our attempt to live with death, then perhaps it is part of our effort to contain death by making it intelligible. And that thought makes room for a suspicion that when it comes to facing death, conceptuality itself might serve as a tranquillizer.”

In the Wittgensteinian sense, thinking about death comes up against the limitations of language. Lear quotes the philosopher Cora Diamond on “the difficulty of reality”: “the experience of the mind’s not being able to encompass something which it encounters.” This existential reality is not much alleviated by contemplating “the majestic beauty of the laws of decay” or thinking that science can reveal our “true place in the system of beings.”

The essays in Imagining the End place questions about death and mourning within the Aristotelian context of what it means to live a good life. How do we develop and recognize moral excellences? How does the moral life contribute to human flourishing? Why are we drawn to, even seduced by, excellence, beauty, and nobility while the attraction remains in some essential aspect “enigmatic”? Such experiences elude reductive analysis, and that fact should keep us humble, both spiritually and intellectually.

Lear approaches these riddles by examining our response to the possibility of climate catastrophe, to skepticism about the value of the humanities, and to the role that moral exemplars play in the development of individual character. Why, he asks in one particularly fascinating essay, were the Confederate dead at the Battle of Gettysburg left unburied or partially buried and not properly mourned? Why was it impossible for those who fought for the Union to find a way for the enemy dead to be mourned without valorizing them or their cause? How should we, in our own politically polarized moment, understand that failure to recognize a common humanity?

As Lear sees it, we constantly negotiate the difference between our inner mental and emotional life and our partial understanding of others and the outer world. The fact that we often hide our true motivations from ourselves — a problem psychoanalysis can clarify — helps explain the persistence of irrational human behavior. Mourning connects those inner and outer worlds in meaningful ways. In mourning “we are active trying to understand the meanings of our attachments,” and “making meaning is our characteristic activity; it is how we flourish, even in times of pain and grief.” It turns material change into value-laden loss. In that sense, mourning “constitutes us as beings with a history, a history that continues to matter.” It knits the past to the present and to the future.

Whereas Richardson endorses Emerson’s and Thoreau’s belief that the source of resilience is a disindividualized Nature, Lear argues that mourning and the resilience it engenders can be understood only from the uniquely human perspective. “But that does not in and of itself mean it is ‘merely subjective’ in any pejorative sense of the term.” In other words, it is not merely a projection of irrational fears or wishes. As we make our way in the world, we use conceptual terms to try to understand “others and the world we inhabit,” Lear writes. “And yet there are experiences at the heart of human life that . . . threaten the fabric of intelligibility.” The rituals and customs of mourning, he suggests, are the proper response to such threats. Only imaginative efforts that implicitly acknowledge the inscrutable, seemingly incoherent nature of these liminal experiences can reconcile our inner and outer worlds.

Lear moves agilely among the ideas of such philosophers as Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein while using the insights of psychoanalysis to explore the human drive to create meaning. “The development of the capacity to understand — oneself, others, and the world — is itself a gift,” he maintains. Wonder and gratitude should be our response, our “basic attunement to the world.” “No statement of facts, however comprehensive, can ever get to” the source of our moral intuitions. Ethics “is not about anything in the world — though in some uncanny sense ‘it’ is ever present,” he writes, paraphrasing Wittgenstein.

The very existence of the world, our experience of meaningfulness and beauty, the practice of philosophy, and a love of learning are all reasons Lear gives for his own sense of gratitude. For others, he acknowledges, the existence of meaningfulness and beauty suggests there might be a source of goodness beyond this world. Such an understanding is not all that distant from William James’s thinking: “If this life is not a real fight, in which something is gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals. . . . But it feels like a real fight . . . which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears.”

On the final page of this wondrous and humanizing book, Lear notes that what he recommends should be our basic attunement to the world does have possible religious implications. It might even find expression in “an impulse in the direction of prayer.” Or as a particularly enigmatic figure once said, blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.