Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

locks of granite which separated Thoreau from this “sister” were not alloutside of him. The door of love closed and he never returned to it.It was the friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson that Thoreau describedas “one long tragedy.” The second friend who proved unworthy wasWilliam Ellery Channing, who seems to have enjoyed shocking Thoreauwith an occasional ribaldry. Tragedy we too can call it, for few men couldhave needed friendship more, and few have been less ready to accommodatethemselves to it. He wrote (11 June 1855):What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers? I walk alone,my heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knockon the earth for my friend. I expect to meet him at every turn; but nofriend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me.Emerson knew that he was incapable of friendship, and the knowledgecaused him some pain—brief pain, for Emerson had a short way withmoral discomfiture; he mounted up into pink clouds and began to give voiceto abstractions. This woeful triangle skirts the comic. A letter has recentlycome to light which gives Channing’s view of a friendship with Emerson.Channing wrote to Elizabeth Hoar from New Bedford on 23 December 1856:How strange it seemed to hear W[aldo] lecturing on friendship. If heknew all the hearts he has frozen, he might better read something onthe fall of human hopes. … I have never parted from him withoutthe bitterest regret, not for having parted, but for having come. …Individualism! It is the point of honor of men and nations in thiscentury. Every nation boasts that it is a nation of individualists and impliesthat the other nations are composed of sheep. (“You Americans—you all eatthe same things; you repeat the same slogans; you read the same book of themonth; the very streets in which you live have not even names but merelynumbers and letters!”) Yet no man (and no nation) is as individualistic as hethinks he is; each is so in one area of his existence, and the extent to which heis—fortunately!—conformist in others is not apparent to him. Friendship isnot incompatible with individualism, as the great pages of Montaigne haveshown us, but it was incompatible in the lives of our Concord philosophers.Thousands of schoolchildren were formerly required to read Emerson’schaotic essay on the subject. For generations, Emerson’s style had the powerto put the judgment to sleep, but one wonders what the teachers made of212