The surprise discovery in rural New Hampshire that revived John Kaag's life and career.
Dozens of times over the past four years, I’ve made the drive from my home in Boston to a long-forgotten library in the middle of New Hampshire, accessible only by dirt road and hidden behind White Mountain pines. It once belonged to William Ernest Hocking, the last great idealist philosopher at Harvard, and though it contains irreplaceable volumes, it was known until recently only to a few of Hocking’s relatives and one very fastidious thief. And me.
I had come to Chocorua, New Hampshire, in 2009, to help plan a conference on William James. But I’m not a particularly dedicated philosopher and in general bore easily, so I soon found myself elsewhere: specifically, considering the virtues of the Schnecken at a German pastry shop. And this is where I found, browsing the scones, a man of ninety, wiry and sharp, who introduced himself as Bun Nickerson. Nickerson moved slowly, like most old philosophers do, but unlike most old philosophers his hobble wasn’t a function of longstanding inactivity. Instead, he explained, it was from farming and professional skiing...
--"The Philosopher and the Thief" (continues)
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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
A Love Story
By John Kaag
259 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
In 2008, a young University of Massachusetts Lowell philosophy professor named John Kaag set out on a fateful road trip. He was driving to Chocorua, N.H., to help organize a conference on William James, who had owned a home in the nearby White Mountains. Stopping for coffee in town, he admitted to a 93-year-old local what he did for a living.
This old man had grown up on the estate of another philosophy professor, William Ernest Hocking, a once powerful and wealthy pillar of Harvard in the early 20th century. On Hocking’s property still stood his private library, a custom-built free-standing pile. Kaag, invited to look in, instantly recognized the early publications of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, on whom Kaag had written his doctoral dissertation — books inscribed by Peirce himself. He found William James’s reading in preparation for “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” with James’s marginalia and annotations. He found signed gift copies from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, which had ended up in Hocking’s hands. Then there were the masterpieces of European philosophy since the 17th century: Descartes’s “Discourse on Method” in a first edition; the first English translation of Hobbes’s “De Cive”; and first editions of significant works by Kant. The books were moldering under inches of dust in an unheated, uncooled limbo.
All this would be a wonderful event in the life of any professor, especially one as gifted and skilled as Kaag in the history of 19th-century philosophy. (One of his previous works concerns Ella Lyman Cabot, “one of the few women of classical American philosophy.”) It would not seem to make for a popular book. But Kaag used the discovery of the library as an excuse to transform his own life. The son of an alcoholic father who had abandoned his family and recently died — and now stuck in a too-early marriage to his freshman-year college girlfriend, even though “I, at least, didn’t have a clue how to be in erotic love” — Kaag had sought a guiding light. He had followed an “ancestor cult” for years, digging through Emerson’s and William James’s and Thoreau’s papers at Harvard, visiting the tourist traps of Concord and Cambridge, to no profound effect. But West Wind, the familiar name for Hocking’s estate, swept all before it. It pushed Kaag finally into rebellion. “In the following months I started cheating on my wife with a roomful of books.”
Kaag sneaks back and forth to New Hampshire. His wife catches him with out-of-state gas station charges on their credit card bill. As she offers to come along on future trips, he resists. He works up the nerve to sell his wedding ring for $278 at “a pawnshop outside of Derry,” and separates from his wife on the eve of his 30th birthday. (She remarried and moved to North Dakota.) Kaag is left alone with his hopeless plan to archive and catalog the books and find a university to rescue them. He is also left, he slowly realizes, in unrequited love with a married colleague, Carol, who will ultimately be competing with him for tenure. He invites her to visit him up at the library...
--How a Philosophy Professor Found Love in a Hidden Library (continues)"...I am a contemporary philosopher, which means that I spent most of my career shying away from philosophy’s personal touch. But then, in 2008, my estranged father died, and my marriage disintegrated, and I slowly fell in love again, and I wrote American Philosophy: A Love Story.
It is a story of a lost philosophical tradition, deeply intimate, a story of a lost library, high in the New Hampshire Whites, and the story of a lost person, namely, me. It is the story, I guess, of this tri-partite recovery.
The book begins and ends at what looks like a small stone house, with three French doors, on four-hundred unsullied acres outside of Chocorua, New Hampshire. But it’s not a house. It’s the nearly abandoned personal library of William Ernest Hocking.
Like the personal approach to philosophy, contemporary thinkers have forgotten this cache of nearly 10,000 books, hidden in the woods, despite the fact that Hocking was the principal figure in Harvard’s esteemed department for the first half of the twentieth century.
When I first came across the building in 2008, it was deserted, unlocked, and filled with first editions from the 17th and 18th century — Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Mill..." --John Kaag (continues)
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