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  For Carol

  The Library is a wilderness of books.

  —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, March 16, 1852

  PROLOGUE: MAYBE

  Harvard University’s Holden Chapel always struck me as an appropriate place to die. The forty-foot brick structure, which is the university’s third-oldest building, has no front windows. Above its entrance are four stone bucrania, bas-relief ox-skull sculptures of the sort that pagans once placed on their temples to keep away evil spirits. On April 15, 1895, when William James was asked to address an audience of young men at the Georgian chapel, it was already more than 150 years old, a fitting setting for the fifty-three-year-old American philosopher to contemplate what he had come to believe was the profoundest of questions: “Is Life Worth Living?”

  It was a place—and a question—I became intimate with in the spring of 2008. I’d spent months scouring Harvard for the origins of American philosophy. I was at Harvard on a postdoc at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences—a temporary reprieve from the permanent unemployment my loving but practical family was sure would follow after I finished my Ph.D. in philosophy—and I wasn’t about to squander the unexpected opportunity to prove them wrong. The aisles at Widener Library, just steps from Holden, are altogether fifty miles long. In the autumn of that year, I’d walked their entire length. When I eventually came up empty, I trotted across the Yard to Houghton Library, where rare books and manuscripts are kept, and combed through the personal papers of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Sanders Peirce. Still nothing. It was only November, I told myself: early days. Research fellowships are for searching—and searching and searching. I hunkered down in my cubicle at Widener and tried to eke out the manuscript I was supposed to be writing on the confluence of eighteenth-century German idealism and American pragmatism. Things were progressing, albeit very slowly.

  But then, on an evening in the spring of 2008, I gave up. Abandoning the research had nothing to do with the work itself and everything to do with the sense that it, along with everything else in my life, couldn’t possibly matter. For the rest of my year at Harvard I assiduously avoided its libraries. I avoided my wife, my family, and friends. When I came to the university at all, I went only to Holden Chapel. I walked past it, sat next to it, read against it, lunched near it, sneaked into it when I could—became obsessed with it. James had, as far as I was concerned, asked the only question that really mattered. Is life worth living? I couldn’t shake it, and I couldn’t answer it.

  For centuries, philosophers and religious thinkers, from the twelfth-century rabbi Maimonides to the seventeenth-century Englishman John Locke, had coolly articulated the belief that life, for any number of unassailable reasons, was worth living. In the thirteenth century the Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas argued that all things—be they amoebas or human beings—have a natural life cycle put into place by an intelligent designer. Far be it from any of God’s creatures to disrupt it. Immanuel Kant’s argument, five hundred years later, was less theologically speculative. Rational beings, he said, have a duty not to destroy our own rational capacities. In Kant’s words, “[S]uicide is not abominable because God has forbidden it; on the contrary, God has forbidden it because it is abominable.”

  William James had pondered the abominable since at least his early twenties. By many accounts, he’d hit rock bottom in 1871, at the age of twenty-nine. As I sat on the still-frozen ground outside Holden in 2008, I had to agree—my twenty-ninth year was about as bad as it gets. One of the sketch pads I’d found in Houghton contained a self-portrait James drew in red crayon—a young man, seated, hunched over, with an inscription over the figure: HERE I AND SORROW SIT. Most of the reasons his philosophical predecessors offered to persevere in life bored James to death. To him, they were little more than clichéd maxims, out of touch with the particularities of depression and crisis. Still, he was well aware that such arguments had served as the existential anchor for an untold number of happy lives. Indeed, during his lecture in Holden Chapel he observed that his audience, a group from Harvard’s Young Men’s Christian Association, brimmed with what he often called “healthy-mindedness,” a psychological and moral disposition that all but affirmed the conclusions of Aquinas and Kant.

  The Harvard YMCA had been established in 1886 as an evangelical society. Most of the members of James’s audience believed that the Bible is the Word of God and Jesus is Savior and Lord. The question of life’s worth, for these devout men, was settled well in advance of any lecture. Denying the value of human life was blasphemy, and the ultimate form of this denial—suicide—an unspeakable sin. But James suspected that this affirmation of human life, as emphatic as it was universal, ignored the experience of a growing number of people who weren’t so sure about the value of their own lives.

  James, by then quite famous as the father of American psychology and philosophy, was one of these people—“sick-souled,” as he put it. My own soul, from adolescence onward, had never been terribly robust, and that rainy spring it had taken a turn for the worse. James knew something the faithful often miss: that believing in life’s worth, for many people, is a recurring struggle. He’d overdosed on chloral hydrate in the 1870s, just “for the fun of it,” as he wrote to his brother Henry, to see how close he could come to the morgue without actually going there. James was not alone in his curiosity. A decade later his colleague Edmund Gurney, founder of the Society for Psychical Research, took the experiment with life and death too far, testing what turned out to be a fatal dose of chloroform. In response to Gurney’s death, James wrote to his brother once again. “[This death] make[s] what remains here seem strangely insignificant and ephemeral, as if the weight of things, as well as the numbers, was all on the other side.” The other side. As in: No. Life is not worth living.

  No, as it turns out, is an answer that has much to recommend it in a place like Holden Chapel. Religious services were moved out of the building in the 1780s, and in the next century it served as a chemistry lab and classroom for the nascent Harvard Medical School, where cadavers were dissected. The Gross Clinic, painted by Thomas Eakins in 1875, gives some idea of the nature of surgery at the time. In it, several doctors perform an operation on a child, working without gloves as their patient’s insides fester in the open air. The patient’s mother sits nearby in horror, covering her face in a futile attempt to escape what James understood all too well: At the end of the existential day, we are all a bunch of smelly carcasses. James would have been aware of the chapel’s gory medical history as he pondered life’s worth with the YMCA.

  * * *

  On March 11, 2008, I watched my father die. His liver was in bad shape. His esophagus was shot to hell. Saying you have esophageal squamous cell carcinoma is often a very long way of saying you drank too much, which my father did. At the end, tragically, ironically, he couldn’t even swallow. The same thing that beat up his liver and throat also destroyed his family
. I didn’t much like him. So I surprised myself when I accepted my stepmother’s invitation to watch him die on a snowy evening at a hospital in Buffalo, New York. But there he was, swollen hands, puffy face, no breath—something out of Dr. Gross’s clinic. It all seemed like a cruel joke. Maybe life was worth living. But maybe you would live only to die surrounded by a distraught second wife and your estranged and dry-eyed sons.

  The truth is, I’d often imagined—and occasionally fantasized about—my father’s demise. In my dreams, at the brink of death, he’d finally realize how short life actually was, how one could mess it up, squander the opportunity to be deeply and irrevocably responsible. The shadow of death, I imagined, had that sort of power. And so, at the end, he’d talk to me like a loving father would to his son. He would convince me that our brief time together hadn’t been a hollow, painful waste. He’d tell me how not to become a drunk, or a deadbeat husband, or a runaway father.

  Of course, none of this happened. When I got to the hospital, he was already largely gone, as silent and unconscious as he’d been for most of my life. There was no great sense of closure, no teachable moment. Just the painful confirmation of all my suspicions, that life was pretty much meaningless.

  James entertained this grim possibility rather seriously. When faced with unshrinking hardships, he told the audience at Holden, we’re inclined to believe not in “the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, [but] that of an awful Power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom.” Not even the protective bucrania can save us. “This,” he continued, “is an uncanny, a sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar unheimlichkeit, or poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together which cannot possibly agree.” On the one hand, we cling to the hope that our world is both rational and meaningful; on the other, we may eventually come to see that it is neither. We have great expectations for our lives, but we die in the wintry hellhole of Buffalo or get hacked up on tables in Holden Chapel.

  James could have told his audience at Holden that life was planned out in advance and that lasting existential meaning was ensured by a benevolent and all-knowing God; that, as Leibniz argued in the seventeenth century, we live in the best of all possible worlds; or that we have a moral duty to go on even if it turns out that this world is, at root, evil. He could have tried to sugarcoat my trip to Buffalo, to tell me that despite all appearances, life was necessarily meaningful. In other words, he could have lied. But he didn’t. Instead, he answered life’s most difficult question in the most honest way possible: “Maybe,” James said.

  “It all depends,” James explains, “on the liver.” The liver, three pounds of reddish-brown flesh wedged below the diaphragm, was once considered the source of blood and therefore the seat of life itself. Back in the time of the bucrania, people would gut an animal just to get a good look at one. The liver was the sine qua non of many ancient forms of divination. Seers from Babylon to Rome examined the organ—much as phrenologists would later study the shape of the skull—to divine a future that was just barely within one’s control. The liver, according to the ancients, was a way to negotiate the vagaries of chance. Had I looked at my father’s liver when I was young, it might’ve told me all sorts of things: that he would attempt to help me get over my fear of the dark by turning off the lights in the garage and locking me in, that my mother would never fall in love again, that becoming him would be the single greatest fear of my life.

  In the years that have followed my father’s death, I’ve slowly come to think that perhaps things aren’t quite as dark and inevitable as this. I’ve come to see how empowering James’s “maybe” can be. It took writing a book about it—this book—for it to really sink in. For American philosophers like James, determining life’s worth is, in a very real sense, up to us. Our wills remain the decisive factor in making meaning in a world that continually threatens it. Our past does not have to control us. The risk that life is wholly meaningless is real, but so too is the reward: the ever-present chance to be largely responsible for its worth. The appropriate response to our existential situation is not, at least for James, utter despair or suicide, but rather the repeated, ardent, yearning attempt to make good on life’s tenuous possibilities. And the possibilities are out there, often in the most unlikely places.

  PART I

  HELL

  IN A DARK WOOD, A LIBRARY

  I spent my spring at Holden with James. Then the tourists descended on Harvard Yard—gawking, photo oping, jabbering, ridiculous tourists. In hindsight I know they’re no more ridiculous than an angst-ridden philosopher camped out on a blanket in the quad, contemplating the sorry state of his father’s liver. But at the time, my urge to kill them all was competing with my urge to kill myself. So on a warm afternoon in June I fled Cambridge, setting out on a final, desperate mission to recover the fathers of American philosophy and to answer James’s question once and for all. My day of philosophical pilgrimage started with a drive out to the white clapboard house in Concord that Ralph Waldo Emerson once called home, then spending the afternoon wandering the two-mile loop around Walden Pond. I returned to the Yard only as dusk was approaching and my tourist nemeses were dispersing. In the twilight, I read Emerson’s “American Scholar” address in what I figured was likely the precise location where he’d given the lecture in 1837. Oliver Wendell Holmes had called it “America’s Intellectual Declaration of Independence,” a call for American thinkers to take control of their intellectual destiny. After finishing the piece, I made a quick stop at Kirkland Place, just down the street, the house where Charles Sanders Peirce had grown up. Peirce had taken Emerson’s challenge seriously and had created the first genuinely American philosophy, amassing a body of work that was simultaneously scientifically rigorous and unexpectedly spiritual. Then I dropped my car off in a garage in downtown Boston before walking the rest of the way to the Durgin-Park Oyster Bar in the North End. That’s where the Harvard idealist Josiah Royce met his students in the 1890s to discuss salvation and immortality before he shuffled back along the Charles River to his Cambridge home. I thought nothing of salvation and immortality at Durgin-Park, opting instead to drink myself senseless. At the end of the night I stumbled home and tried to convince my wife I wasn’t drunk.

  I was looking for help in all the usual places, all the wrong places. According to Thoreau, we spend no small effort “denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are,” he assures us, “as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre.” Is life worth living? James had found his answer at Holden Chapel, but I had to leave Harvard and Boston entirely. The road was all but forgotten. I am so grateful that I eventually found it.

  * * *

  When you travel north from Boston, after you leave 495 and hit Interstate 95, everything passes rather quickly and you’re in New Hampshire before you know it. But then things slow down. Route 16 into the White Mountains is an odd little stretch, the sort of road that can’t decide whether it wants to accommodate cars, trains, or buggies. It’s stuck, like the small towns it bisects, between two eras. It was built at a time when the Boston Brahmins, who included many Cambridge intellectuals, migrated north to escape the summer heat. The signs of their migration can still be seen: Victorian mansions atop idyllic bluffs, impressive stretches of railroad—now inoperative—hitching posts next to boarded-up 7-Elevens. The 7-Elevens are another type of sign—indicating that the migration is over.

  When you reach Route 113 and turn right, you’re getting close. If you go through the tiny New Hampshire town of Chocorua and pass William James’s summer home, you know you’ve gone too far. James bought the house in 1886, when he’d finally made enough money as a Harvard philosopher to afford a retreat. But it’s not what you are looking for. Backtrack and travel 113 toward the village of Madison. You’ll pass a number of places selling antiques, sad little shops dedicated to helping people stay afloat in the present by selling off their pasts
, entrusting their memories to strangers.

  Route 113 jogs left after a time and passes the borough hall. At this point fir and spruce trees grow right up to the shoulder of the road, making it impossible to see more than a hundred yards ahead or behind. This protected forest is a welcome reminder that not all old things go to waste. Turn left onto Mooney Hill Road and start up the hill. This is the road less traveled in American philosophy. In fact, it doesn’t look like it’s been traveled at all, at least not by anyone without four-wheel drive. Keep going. You think you might be lost. You are, in a sense—the terrain of philosophy you’re approaching has been largely unexplored for more than a century.

  At every fork in the road, take a left. A few miles on a deserted dirt road seems like forever, so you’ll be relieved to see the one-room schoolhouse ahead. Now turn right onto Janus Road and make the final ascent. If you look to your right, you’ll have a clear view of the Sandwich Range of the White Mountains, with Mount Washington off your right-hand shoulder. If you look to your left, at first you won’t see anything except white pine, but then you’ll catch sight of two stone buildings of Georgian architecture. One is a very large house. The other is set back in the woods, a short walk from the mansion. Covered with windows, it looks nothing like Holden Chapel. That’s the Hocking library. You’ve arrived at West Wind.

  * * *

  “Traveling is a fool’s paradise,” Emerson once said, “[since] my giant goes with me wherever I go.” That’s generally true, but when I travel to certain places, my giant leaves me alone long enough for me to think. William Ernest Hocking found—or rather made—one of these rare places at West Wind.

  Like many American philosophers, Hocking didn’t initially intend to become one. Born in Cleveland in 1873, he spent his teenage years in Joliet, Illinois. His mother came from the Pratt family of Southbridge, Massachusetts, previously from Plymouth Colony and, prior to that, from the Mayflower. His father, a Canadian, studied medicine in New York and Maryland before moving his family west in the early 1870s. Hocking, the first of five children, grew up in a staunch Methodist family and underwent what he would later call a “conversion experience” that cemented his teenage faith in the Almighty. After finishing high school in 1889, he worked for four years as a surveyor and mapmaker in an attempt to save enough money to enter the University of Chicago, but the financial panic of 1893 dashed these plans, and he settled for Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now Iowa State University) instead.