The Thinker 111
bay. He writes grimly practical essays under the rubric of “The
Wisdom of Life”: he instructs the reader to save money, avoid con-
fl ict with fools, and above all stay away from women, stay away from
marriage.
Nietz sche, no easy judge of intellectual character, quickly recog-
nizes Emerson’s capacities. He does not know how old he is already,
Nietz sche says rather enigmatically of the Sage of Concord, or how
young he is still going to be. But Emerson never really coalesces as
a thinker or a poet (least of all as a poet). His essays provide bril-
liant provocation, but they can veer wildly, like riderless horses.
“O you man without a handle,” Henry James, Se nior, said. But
how could Emerson’s thinking become one of a piece? He was an
arch- householder, his power ful mind tethered to his wife and his
children and his respectability. His friend Thoreau lived alone in the
world, without immediate family, with few friends. From what we
know he died a virgin. His thinking does not have grand expanse.
But it is taut, consistent in itself, and resolved. He died, as Emerson
presumably did not, having worked out the terms of his vision.
Though the thinker often has his coterie, his band of bro th ers
(and occasionally sisters), he is fundamentally a solitary. “In severe
abstraction, let him hold by himself ” (64), Emerson says, and the as-
piring thinker is often alone and lonely. He needs time by himself
to think matters through, for thinking is a protracted endeavor. Wal-
lace Stevens speaks admiringly of “the man who has had the time to
think enough” and of “the impossible possi ble phi los o pher’s man.”
Often the thinker spends as much time working his way out of the
vari ous falsehoods surrounding him as he does working his way
toward the Truth. We are born into a constricted world, where the
values and notions that surround us pass themselves off as the only
right way to live and to think. The phi los o pher in the making has
to overcome his parochial prejudices to fi nd something better, and
this takes time.