Pilgrimage to an American Literary Shrine

In a just-concluded trip back East, I had the privilege to once again visit Concord Massachusetts, one of America’s richest cultural and historical sites just a few miles from Boston. Of course, it is known in the history books as the terminus of Paul Revere’s Ride and the scene of the Battle of Lexington and Concord at the beginning of the American Revolution; but for me as a writer it is a town that birthed and housed a whole pod of brilliant writers and thinkers, all living in the same area, jawing in the same pubs and coffee houses, and eventually being laid to rest in the same cemetery.

No attempt to recap their careers or summarize their works here; if you went to school in the USA, you know their names and should have been urged to read their works. So I’ll just share some personal photos [click photos to enlarge] taken there on Monday, June 25, 2014 in a visit I made there with Linda, a lovely early-life friend with whom I had just reconnected after a 30-year hiatus. If I speak as if these authors too are long-lost friends, it is done with due reverence for voices that provided deep inspiration throughout my own writing career.

It took us some hiking to find Author’s Ridge in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, not that it was badly marked but my preconception about its location from an earlier visit some 15 years ago led us astray. Can’t say Linda thoroughly enjoyed the workout in the warm sun. But we did find the cluster of authors atop a ridge under the oaks. Of course, it’s only their bodies buried there but still damned good DNA to be in close proximity with.

The ambience of Concord is elegant simplicity that speaks of simpler days where the quality of thought and the work of art far outranked personality. Nowhere is it more evident than in cluster of modest graves that contain the remains of the most unique group of writers gathered in a single location: Henry David Thoreau (Walden, Civil Disobedience); Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables); Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, Little Men); and essayist, lecturer, and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature, Self Reliance), who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

We closed our day with a visit to Walden Pond, celebrated in Thoreau’s Walden as an idyllic refuge from the madding crowd, where he studied and lived two years in utter simplicity. Ironically, much of the shoreline is now public beach, and that warm summer day much of Thoreau’s hermitage was occupied by bathers with boom boxes.

Nevertheless, this was the place that inspired the famous passage, which I adopted as a life motto and featured  in my novel The Anathemas. I reproduce it here, including the last two sentences, not always included when this paragraph is quoted, because it is so worth an additional read.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

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