Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

overswayed. Their growth in the affective life had been arrested—some hadeven been frozen, as by shock or trauma—and they must continue to repeatthe mechanisms of that phase forever.Such I feel to have been Emily Dickinson’s story, but Emily Dickinsonwas a genius—that is to say, was charged with extraordinary resources ofthe life force which could break through dams and repair ravage. The die,however, had been cast. The forms of speech that are characteristic of a winningchild will constantly reappear, the bright remarks that set the dinnertable laughing and bring a slight smile even to the most dignified father’sface. Above all, the expressions of affection will be drolly indirect: “I’m lonelysince you went away, kind of shipwrecked like! Perhaps I miss you!” Thisinfantile note may recur at any moment right up to her death, and it wasagainst this that the reparative force of her genius had to struggle. She hasleft us a large amount of mature poetry, and it is with something like awethat we can see the operation of genius fashioning great verse even in thistone which elsewhere can so often distress us.One other aspect of her letters shows us how deeply her affectivelife had been troubled. Emily Dickinson constantly indulges in the fantasythat her loved ones are dead.Much has been written about her preoccupation with mortality andgraves, and with the promise of a beatific hereafter. Certain authorities havedirected us to pay no particular attention to this strain, saying that it didnot exceed the measure indulged in by many of her contemporaries. EmilyDickinson, however, was individual in her treatment of other aspects ofthought and life—in love and friendship, in the description of nature, inphilosophical speculation—and I am prepared to find that both in amountand in kind, her allusions to these matters were also unusual. At all eventsthis recurring vision of her friends as “repealed” is certainly an idiosyncrasy.Among her first letters to Samuel Bowles, she hopes the family is well:“I hope your cups are full. I hope your vintage is untouched. In such a porcelainlife one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one’shopes in a pile of broken crockery.”And later, to Mrs. Bowles: “We are all human, Mary, until we aredivine, and to some of us that is far off, and to some as near as the ladyringing at the door; perhaps that’s what alarms.”(There is the old inconsistency of the pietistic convention: it is veryalarming that one’s friends may at any moment become divine.) There arescores of these anticipated farewells; what is strange and disquieting aboutthem is that Emily Dickinson almost never includes herself among the disap-221