The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

Two years after the death of his small son, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote of the experience, "I cannot get it nearer to me" (CW 3:29). Most readers have been troubled by this remark, reading it as a sign that Emerson's relationship to grief and even to his son was disturbingly oblique, and the predominant response has been that it demonstrates he was detached, cold, and disconnected in the service of his transcendental philosophy.¹ Such a response is grounded in the tacit assumption that philosophy seems to be, or to call for, some intellectually grounded transcendence of the personal, whether the personal is whimsical or fatal. Emerson himself worried at times that he was too cold, too intellectual, even as he called for a "philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life … the meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan" (CW 1:67), a philosophy, according to his inheritor Stanley Cavell, of the ordinary. Concerns about Emerson's apparent detachment seem justified by the words that surround his short, stark sentence. Bewildered, Emerson admits that he feels something has fallen off from him without leaving a scar, that in his son's death he "seem[s] to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more" (CW 3:29). But though Emerson made a point of meeting his own periodic and frequent need for solitude, nevertheless, in his "down-to-earth streak" (Richardson 1995, 385), he desired and felt "an original relation," deep and intimate, with the ordinary and near (CW 1:7). [End Page 158]

Thus I return to those words, "I cannot get it nearer to me," and wonder whether his thought is in a sense unfinished, that he cannot get Waldo's death nearer to him because it is already so close, so intimate and visceral a loss, that there is no place "nearer." It is already "nearest," just as Waldo was dearest. As I write, it is six years since I lost a brother to suicide. Emerson's words in "Experience" haunt me, and I have come to believe that they bespeak both his simultaneous detachment from Waldo's death and his intimate closeness to the bewildering fact of losing not only a son but also his tacit certitude that his son was his own, "a part of me, which could not be torn away … nor enlarged" (CW 3:29) without a concomitant attenuation or growth on the father's part. Emerson's words say more about his epistemic state than about his emotional state, and he spoke both his truth and mine. I cannot get the fact of my brother's death nearer to me because it is at once only remotely, if at all, conceivable and has lodged itself within me. I cannot get the impact of the fact any nearer to me than it is. It is internally recorded in ways so visceral that I am not sure how close to my thinking mind I can get them, how close my thoughts and words can get to them. The complexity of nearness is such that the experience looms elusively outside my grasp.

Philosophical approaches to grief encompass a variety of styles and delivery modes, including religious, empiricist, stoical, and psychotherapeutic, which try to console or comfort, often by "fixing" the grieving one's "problem" or "inability" to "move on."² Emerson suffered from such well-wishers and their advice and admonishments when his first wife died and presumably when he grieved other losses as well. Moving on seems not to have been his goal but, rather, getting nearer to his experience, not only in "Experience" but also in his many visits to his first wife's grave, including opening her coffin more than a year after she died. He "ventured to look into the coffin" of Waldo as well, when fifteen years after the boy's death Emerson removed the remains to his lot in Sleepy Hollow (JMN 14:154). Given Emerson's philosophical bent of mind, the question for him was how philosophy, with its tendency to reside from the neck up, could accommodate the embodied, the particular, and thus help him...