Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“Yes, but didn’t… didn’t you admire his language?” Mr. Emerson had used language in an oblique and original way that, while it made his personality shine brilliantly, also had made the ostensible subject of his talk opaque, so that, to understand him, one had practically to invent for oneself what he was saying. I found this experience nearly wonderful, as if he were speaking poetry. But I knew not what to point to in Mr. Emerson’s lecture that might have appealed to Father. If you did not swallow the whole of it, you could not accept a part. And if you accepted a part, you had to be nourished by the whole.

“His language? Come on, Owen. Airy nonsense, that’s all it is. For substance, the man offers us clouds, fogs, mists of words. ‘Times of terror; indeed! What does he know of terror? Ralph Waldo Emerson has neither the wit nor the soul to know terror. And he surely has no Christian belief in him! That’s what ought to be terrifying him, the state of his own naked soul.” He sputtered on as we walked back to Dr. Howe’s residence, where the good Mrs. Howe had promised to leave us some cold supper.

I followed silently, pondering the meaning and import of his fulmination, even as I nurtured an odd thought which had come to me towards the end of Mr. Emerson’s peroration — that Father resembled no man so much as the Concord poet himself. The Old Man was a rough-cut, Puritan version of Ralph Waldo Emerson, it seemed to me that first night in Boston and for many years afterwards, and even unto the present time, when it matters probably not at all. But it was that night of some personal significance to me.

Even physically, the two looked enough alike to have been brothers — although Father would have been the cruder, more muscular version. They both wore old-fashioned, hawk-nosed, Yankee faces with pale, deep-set eyes that looked out at the world with such an unblinking gaze as to force you to avert your own gaze at once or give yourself over to the man’s will. And just as easily and selflessly as Father believed in his God, Mr. Emerson believed in the power and everlasting truth of what he called Nature. For both men, God, or Nature, was beginning, cause, and end, and man was merely an agent for beginning, cause, and end.

As I walked, dropping further and further behind the Old Man in my reverie, I found myself amusing myself with the picture of Mr. Emerson coming off a meeting with Father and imagined him saying the same things to his son about the crazy man John Brown. “The man’s truly a boob! For the life of me, I can’t understand his fame!” For if there was a flaw in Mr. Emerson’s argument, it is that he was probably incapable of seeing my father as the very hero he was calling for. And if there was a flaw in my father’s heroism, it may be that he could not see himself in Mr. Emerson’s portrait.

We turned off Charles Street to make our way uphill towards Louisburg Square, and I remember a young man striding downhill in our direction, well-dressed, fresh-faced, and whistling a tune — no tune I recognized; like a bird he was, whistling for the sheer pleasure of it. A purely happy fellow, undivided in himself, it seemed, as if he’d been successfully courting a lovely maiden and had been invited to return tomorrow evening to continue. He whistled past and continued down the street, to his bachelor rooms, no doubt. A happy man! I stopped in my tracks and watched him for a few seconds, wondering what it felt like, to be so uncomplicatedly happy as he, when Father called, “Hurry, Owen! Keep up, keep up! Don’t stare after people like a bumpkin.”

I quickly caught up to him, and when we had walked on in silence a ways, the Old Man, in a low voice that suggested he was having second thoughts, asked me what was my true opinion of Mr. Emerson’s lecture. I saw that he was now somewhat embarrassed by his earlier outburst and that some of the poet’s words may in fact have touched him. Perhaps he had been stung by their similarity to his own thoughts and beliefs and had never before heard them so handsomely expressed, and thus his anger had been directed not at Mr. Emerson but at himself.

“Truthfully?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I have to say, I took his words as high counsel, Father. And prophecy.”

He did not answer at first. Then he said, “High counsel, eh? You heard that? You heard that and nothing else, nothing that contradicted your beliefs?”

“No. What I heard only corroborated my beliefs and strengthened me in them. Not everything Mister Emerson said was altogether clear to me, of course, but all of it was very beautiful. All of it.”

I thought that Father would then upbraid me, but instead he pursed his lips as he often did when thinking something through for the first time and said, “Very interesting. That’s interesting to me, Owen. And prophecy? You heard that, too?”

“Well, yes. I believe so.”

“Very interesting. High counsel and prophecy. Well, who knows? God speaks to us in unexpected ways. Even in the words of philosophers,” he said, and smiled and reached up and put his arm over my shoulder.

We briskly walked that way, side by side, the remaining few blocks to Dr. Howe’s home, and the entire distance, as I strode along, I whistled the same, nearly tuneless tune that I’d heard the happy young man whistle before. I believe that I felt for those few moments just as he had; and it was grand.

I was no more eager to depart with Father from Boston, even for a place as inviting as England, than I had been to leave Springfield for Timbuctoo, and for many of the same reasons. Here, in a city amongst a multitude of distractions and competing truths, it was easier not to succumb to the singular force of Father’s truth. I was stronger here. Isolation — such as we had endured in Timbuctoo and even to a lesser degree back in Ohio and before that in New Richmond, and such as I knew I would endure with Father aboard a ship and in a foreign land-bound me, bound all us Browns, the more tightly to the Old Man’s view of things.

Here in Boston, however, even more than in Springfield, I saw good men and women everywhere who despised slavery, who had thought deeply and long on matters of religion and moral philosophy, and who loved goodness and truth fully as much as did Father, and yet they seemed not so fierce and judgemental in their ways as he. Perhaps they were indeed soft and compromised by wealth and privilege, as Father claimed, made prideful by their fame and the admiration of their like-minded, high-minded compatriots. Perhaps Father was right, and they were, as he liked to say, “boobs.” But I could not help but admire their easy tolerance of one another and their patient optimism. Father’s way was lonely, painfully lonely to me, and I never felt it so much as when we were circulating in cities amongst the men and women who should normally have been our natural allies.

In the holy war against slavery, Father seemed more and more, and especially here in Boston, like a Separatist. I found myself growing cross and impatient with him for it and the next day nearly quarreled with him. He and I had gone down to the docks from Dr. Howe’s to confirm our bookings aboard the Cumbria and to verify our Monday morning departure with the tide two days thence, and also just to look at the ship itself, to appraise her size and proportions, so as to anticipate better the degree of our physical discomfort for the duration of our journey. Neither of us had ever traveled so far before — our longest journey by boat may have been the ferry across Lake Champlain from Vermont to New York or a horse-drawn barge on the Erie Canal. And though, naturally, we did not speak of it to one another, we were both more than a little nervous and even somewhat fearful.