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The Journals of Bronson Alcott

Mark Pearce

    I drove up into the mountains and found a quiet valley surrounded by hills. I had just acquired the Journals of Bronson Alcott and wanted solitude so that I could delve uninterrupted into the world of the Transcendentalists. I had always admired the Transcendentalists as the members of a particular literary and philosophical movement. But through Bronson’s journals, I began to get a sense of them as a group of close friends who hung out together, and, incidentally, happened to write about their thoughts and experiences.
    When Emerson was a complete unknown and Thoreau had never written a word, Bronson wrote about hiking up into the hills with his two buddies to go swimming in the river. He said he believed they would both be famous someday.
    One day Bronson took Thoreau to meet his friend Walter, because he thought the two of them would get along well together. They climbed the stairs to the garret bedroom which Walter shared with his brother in their mother’s home. Walter was Walt Whitman.
    Bronson had an apple orchard, and wrote, “Brought apples and cider today to my friends Hawthorne, Channing, and Emerson. Also Thoreau, where I spent the evening.”
    When Margaret Fuller died in a shipwreck just off the coast, Thoreau and another friend went down to the shore to search for her body and her manuscripts. Her body and her manuscripts. Because with this crowd, their manuscripts were an important part of who they were. They all wrote journals, and from time to time they would give each other their journals to read.
    When Bronson decided he wanted to marry Abigail May, he didn’t propose. He gave her his journals to read. Among the anecdotes and philosophical musings, he had written many passages ruminating on what he thought of her.
    She accepted.
    I closed the journal and looked at the hills around me. My papers fluttered in the breeze. I pulled out my pad and pen and began to write.

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