Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literary critic Marcus (Amazonia) serves up a distinctive biography of philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson that homes in on “those elements of Emerson’s life that spoke to me most directly.” Fortunately, Marcus’s instincts are a good guide to the shifting sands of Emerson’s life and thought. Examining how grief shaped his subject’s outlook, Marcus explains that Emerson was distraught after the deaths of his first wife in 1831 and his eldest son at age five 11 years later, leading him to adopt a solipsistic view of human consciousness as fundamentally lonely and unable to close the gap between self and other (“The soul blots out everything else, including your wife’s soul, and maybe your dead son’s,” writes Marcus). Elsewhere, Marcus grapples with Emerson’s complicated views on race (he was an abolitionist who claimed that whites were superior to Black people) and his tumultuous friendship with protégé Henry David Thoreau, whom Emerson was at first enamored with, but came to view as a disappointment after Thoreau’s poetry career stalled. Marcus provides astute insight into how Emerson’s life influenced his transcendentalist beliefs, and the empathetic portrayal of Emerson’s decline into dementia and tender relationship with his eldest daughter, who was his primary caregiver at the end of his life, is a poignant highlight. The result is a discerning take on an essential 19th-century American thinker. Photos. (Mar.)