“A foolish consistency,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his famous 1841 essay on self-reliance, “is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little philosophers and divines.” It is the kind of aphorism that made Emerson a cultural phenomenon in his own time and ours, a kernel of truth weighted with just the right lilt so that it rolls off the tongue and burrows into one's mind. Even so, it is hard to read Emerson’s paean to radical individualism at a time of worsening threats abroad and growing political nightmare at home and not wish he had found something a little nicer to say about the virtues of consistency.
Still, when the ground is constantly shifting under one’s feet, one can’t help but be fascinated by the kinds of people who would embrace an earthquake. That is the image of Emerson that emerges in Glad to the Brink of Fear, James Marcus’ new biography of America’s famous literary iconoclast. Emerson’s remarkable life spanned almost the entire breadth of the 19th century, and his essays gave Americans a vocabulary with which to understand themselves during an era that was far more tempestuous than even our own.
Marcus calls his biography a “portrait,” and aptly so. He eschews a chronological account of the Sage of Concord’s life, artfully reassembling the pieces in an order of his own design. The effect is a biography that is deeply intimate, but not just for what it reveals about Emerson’s own life. Instead of shrouding himself behind the biographer’s veil of objectivity, Marcus pulls back the curtain, punctuating his narrative with unusually candid admissions about what Emerson’s life illuminates about his own. In doing so, he gently jostles our assumptions about the purpose of the biography and invites us to reexamine what we might be looking for when we plumb the lives of others in turbulent times.
Rather than start with Emerson's birth or death, Marcus opens the biography with his disillusionment. The product of seven generations of clergymen, Emerson came of age during the Second Great Awakening, a period rocked by a wave of democratized evangelical energy that fundamentally altered the religious landscape of the United States. Rather than discovering a deeper commitment to his role as a Unitarian minister, however, Emerson began radically retreating from the idea of organized religion altogether. Like his more orthodox contemporaries, Emerson sought an unmediated encounter with the divine—he just believed they were looking for it in the wrong place.