Concord Days (1872)

AUTHOR: Alcott, Amos Bronson

KEYWORDS: food, land usage, environmentalism, women’s rights, Suffrage, slavery, Abolition, labor rights, nationalism, patriotism, citizenship, race, education, pedagogy, nature, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo & Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Concord Days traces Alcott's autobiographical musings on a sundry range of topics during his life in Orchard House, Concord, from April to September, 1869. The respective months feature as structuring devices and chapter titles. The chapters are organized in a series of prose vignettes the themes of which range widely from, among others, life in the countryside to speculative philosophy, from reflections on the work of Alcott's contemporaries and friends Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau to thoughts on the importance of such historical figures as Plato, Swedenborg, and Goethe, to comments on topics such as education, tradition, childhood, and sleeping and dreaming.

The book opens with the scene of writing: Alcott in his study going through his papers in order to “read, write, recreate” (3). But life escapes being “arrest[ed]” in writing, as “[a]ll is in the flowing moments.” Yet this is the task Alcott sets himself in these pages: “attaining the art of portraying my thoughts, occupations, surroundings, friendships” (4). His starting point is his own house. From the get-go, Alcott insists on a harmonious relation with nature in all aspects of life. This includes architecture and landscape gardening. For Alcott, harmony with nature is a moral imperative, for “[h]e who is so far weaned from the landscape, or indifferent to it, as not to derive a sweet and robust habit of character therefrom, seems out of keeping with nature and himself” (10), as Alcott writes. Neglect of nature amounts to self-neglect. In describing both his house and its surroundings, he accordingly laments that the “venerable woods once crowning these are fast falling victims to the axe” and that “the primitive features of the landscape are being obliterated by the modern facilities for business and travel” (9, 10). Alcott believes that cities are morally problematic in this respect, as they inhibit the human's “kindred alliance with primeval things” (11). This alliance is innate, so much so that “when occasion provokes” it seems “as if men were trees transformed, and delighted to claim their affinities with their sylvan ancestry.” In closing this section, Alcott even goes so far as to claim the human as but a kind of plant: “Man never tires of Nature's scene, / Himself the liveliest evergreen” (11). Humans may be their highest form, but they are substantially nothing other than plants themselves. This identity is metaphysical, not empirical. While empirically, they are of course different (your neighbor simply is not a tree, in the sense that they are not branches and foliage growing out of roots), transcendentally, they are the same (your neighbor ultimately is a tree, in the sense that trees and humans are simply expressions of the same life forces). Thoreau, Alcott says, perfectly embodies this kind of identity between human and plant. According to Alcott, he only did not give us “pastorals of which Virgil and Theocritus might have envied him” because he was more plant than human! His “human sentiment” simply was not “as tender and as pervading.” But in a human life that lacks awareness of one's plant-being, that is without a “close companionship with nature” and without “sympathy with common things,” “poetry has fled” and there is not poetry at all (12). With Thoreau, it was actually “nature choosing to speak through his mouth-piece” (15).

Of Emerson, Alcott writes that “his compositions affect us, not as logic linked in syllogisms, but as voluntaries rather, as preludes, in which one is not tied to any design of air, but may vary his key or note at pleasure, as if improvised without any particular scope of argument.” A true romantic, Alcott values the musical affectivity in Emerson's lectures over their argumentative rigor. Though he does not say that they actually lack rigor – they merely seem “as if” they did not pursue an argument. This is a matter of emphasis. What is remarkable is how they manage to put us in a state of wonder and amazement: “His rhetoric dazzles by its circuits, contrasts, antitheses,” Alcott continues, with “imagination, as in all sprightly minds, being his wand of Power” (27). What counts is creativity and synthesis rather than logic and analysis, as only in this way can one follow and reproduce “the order of ideas” (33). This is only possible, because Emerson's works, too, are ultimately products of nature: They are “cloud-fashioned,” results of “the sidereal year,” “[a]fternoon walks,” “fields,” “wood-paths,” “brook-sides,” in short, they are “[c]omposed of surrounding matters” (33-34). To a large extent, this is what makes him “the representative mind of this country” (38).

Indeed, for Alcott, “Nature is the best dictionary and school of eloquence; genius the pupil of sun and stars, wood-lands, waters, the fields, the spectacle of things seen under all aspects, in all seasons and moods. Blot these from his vision, and the scholar's page were of small account” (42). Only those who, by means of their genius, are in attunement with nature can claim to be true scholars. In the vignette on “Scholarship,” Alcott thus expounds that “[m]uch learning does not make an accomplished critic; taste, sensibility, sympathy, ideality, are indispensable.” Only “genius alone comprehends and appreciates truly the works of genius” (49). It is thus not surprising that Alcott also talks about the joys of rural life and, in particular, gardening, an activity that is precisely said to strengthen one's “affinities with earth and sky” (59). Alcott explicitly states that “[t]he garden is the tie uniting man and nature” and gardening the means “of converting the wild into the human” and thus to “complete” nature (60). Lamenting the lack of good pastoral poetry in America, he proceeds to quote William Ellery Channing's poem “New England” in its entirety (66-72). He then goes on to praise the art of conversation as practised in the “Radical Club,” as for Alcott, conversation is the most appropriate tool of education. It is a particularly suitable method of coming “face to face with principles and ideas” (73). This is so because conversation proceeds synthetically, holistically, rather than through dialectic debate and argument. “Good discourse sinks differences and seeks agreements,” as Alcott puts it (74). The art of conversation thrives on humility. Women are thus particularly disposed towards it – “[d]ebate is masculine, conversation is feminine” (76) –,  though they are almost always cut short by overconfident and brash men. Ultimately, Alcott believes that gender diversity results in the best conversations: “Only where the sexes are brought into sympathy, is conversation possible” (75). On the occasion of a new edition of Fuller's works, including her memoirs, Alcott praises her advocacy on behalf of women's rights, calling her “a sibylline intelligence that divined oracularly” (78). While still insisting that women are best served by sticking to the domestic sphere, Alcott elevates the domestic to the site of those “virtues upon which communities are founded, and in which they must be firmly rooted to prosper and endure” (79), thus making the domestic the very foundation of the polis. The domestic is not simply the private realm, it is the basis of any and all politics.

After having declared the family, particularly children and mothers, “the sensitive plant of civility, the measure of culture” and the “college” and “faculty of affections,” even the very “springs of genius and sensibility” (86), Alcott proceeds to praise Pythagoras as the most important ancient source of culture and education. He declares his life “transcendently good” and the model of “piety and discipline,” which, importantly, included abstention “from all intoxicating drinks, and from animal food” thus resulting in a pure soul and a healthy body (89-90). Alcott then gives a short report on his conversational pedagogy as practised in his Boston teaching days, including a sample class-room conversation, before he concludes the “May” chapter with some thoughts on immortality and life, extensively quoting from Plutarch's letter to his wife on the occasion of the death of their daughter. The subsequent “June” chapter opens with yet further musings on nature-derived pleasure and satisfaction, namely the delight of an early-morning breakfast of freshly plucked strawberries. As for Alcott such natural pleasures are doubled or heightened by poetry, he intersperses his text with various verses by different authors that dwell precisely on the joys that strawberries and berries in general provide. After expounding on the value of letter writing, which Alcott believes to be the best literary way to represent life (123), he praises that of books. For Alcott, next to conversations, letters, and seeking inspiration in nature, books are the main resource for moral education (in the romantics' expansive sense of the term). In both sub-chapters, he again quotes extensively from the works of other authors, such as Pliny the Elder and Thoreau, to name but two.

He praises the Journal of Speculative Philosophy as established by a group of scholars who would come to be known as the St. Louis Hegelians. Generally prizing metaphysical endeavors over those of mere “naturalists” (145) such as Mill and Spencer (the two philosophers explicitly named by Alcott in this context), he exalts about the international “renaissance” (Alcott is quoting Sanborn here) of metaphysical thought involving, next to the St. Louis Hegelians, German idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), the British romantics (Coleridge), British Hegelianism (Stirling), and the American Transcendentalists. Basically, Alcott is excited about any philosophy the maxim of which is that “[t]he One is One out of whose womb the Not One is born to perish perpetually at its birth” (145). He then briefly delineates the history of this tradition including thinkers such as the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Plotinus, the mystics, and the Cambridge Platonists, among others. The subsequent sub-chapter is accordingly reserved for Plotinus, singling out his pedagogy and his “uncommon power of intellection,” the maintenance of which, according to Alcott, included “admirable temperance in meats and drinks” (150). The announcement of Harvard's upcoming lecture courses (including Emerson's “Natural History of Intellect”) serves Alcott as the opportunity to address what he calls ideal culture (the sub-chapter's heading) but would have been more appropriately named the culture of idealism. Again, Alcott's outlook is comparative and transatlantic. And again, Alcott advocates on behalf of a pedagogy and an education that focus on the philosophy of mind and the “Method of the Mind” (155), as he calls it. All else results in “a showy and superficial training” (155). It is in these pages that Alcott gives us his philosophy in a nutshell: “The soul leads the senses; the reason the understanding; imagination the memory; instinct and intuition include and prompt the Personality entire.” This is so because for Alcott, “Ideas are solvents of all mysteries, whether in matter or mind” (156) and “[t]hings are symbols of thoughts [that is, Ideas], and nature the mind's dictionary” (157). Hence the task is to attune oneself to the realm of ideas within and beyond things. Alcott concludes the “June” chapter with vignettes on Goethe and Carlyle, two “seer[s] of Spirit” (159). But their visionary capacities are not wholly developed yet, they are not holistic enough – important as they are, they essentially remain thinkers of transition (159, 161).

On the occasion of Independence Day, Alcott discusses the ills and atrocities of and leading up to the recent Civil War (most notably slavery, of course) and the lessons to be learned and conclusions to be drawn from this darkest period in American history. As in life in general, in politics, too, “Ideas are the royal Presidents” for Alcott (168). He is slightly optimistic, hoping that “[r]eform in capital and labor, temperance, woman's social and political condition, popular education, powers of corporations, international communication” will “plant the republic [...] upon stable foundations” (169). He follows this up with a veritable eulogy of Wendell Phillips and his strict “adherence to principle” (173), his oratory on par with Emerson, and his Abolitionism. Next to Phillips, Emerson, Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, too, are lauded for their progressivism and abolitionist politics. But even “[i]f ideas are in the ascendant,” the current age is but an age of “Bronze and Iron” rather than gold (178). Next to instrumental reason and naturalism, capitalism is the chief source of this situation, as it fosters the production of material desires. Hence, “[a]ny attempt to simplify and supply one's wants by abstinence and self-help is in the most hopeful direction.” Otherwise, we simply continue “to become poor at the cost of becoming rich” (179). The experiment at Fruitlands, Alcott insists, has to be understood in this context. What is needed is “a fair distribution of the avails of labor, opportunities for labor of head or hand for all, – the right to be educated and virtuous included, as the most important” (182).

The subsequent account of another of Alcott's famous conversations returns, among other things (such as rather dubious thoughts on the relation of grace and morality to certain corporeal features), to Pythagoras and the virtue of temperance, including, once more, his injunction to abstain from “flesh meats” as well as “drinks which heated and disturbed the brain” (186). According to Alcott, such abstention is beneficial to enthusiasm, “an abandonment to the instincts” and “a state of clairvoyance” (186, 187). Swedenborg is one of the prime examples of such an enthusiastic seer capable of “taking his residence for the while in plant, animal, mineral, atom, with the superadded faculty of ravishing its secret,” even that of “the primeval elements, the limbos of chaos and night” (188). The model enthusiast, however, is Jesus Christ. Hence the definition of enthusiasm as “divine intoxication” (190).

After a portrait of Hawthorne, Alcott's Concord neighbor, which depicts him as a shy, somewhat conservative recluse and a few pages on Walter Savage Landor that allow him to return to one of his preferred themes, the art of conversation (Landor was the author of Imaginary Conversations), Alcott goes on to share his thoughts on the importance of sleep and dreams. In the best circumstances, dreams in particular are analogous to mesmeric states of clairvoyance. The final section of the “July” chapter then once more repeats that “[n]ature and spirit are inseparable, and are best studied as a unit” (205). In other words, it is necessary to “explor[e] faithfully the realms of matter and of spirit alike, [...] complementing the former in the latter” (206). What distinguishes humans from the rest of nature is morality, what Alcott calls “being a Person” and “spiritual existence” (207). Having briefly discussed and quoted extensively from Plato's infamous seventh letter (infamous, because authorship is contested), Alcott then proceeds to give a short account of Plato's life, interlacing it with brief comments on notable Platonian themes such as the transmigration of souls, dialectics, and Platonic pedagogy (Alcott's art of conversation is clearly modeled on Plato's dialogues). It is not just Plato's love of wisdom and his pedagogy that are to be emulated, but Plato's life in general: He serves as the model for how to live the good life. Importantly, this includes taking care of one's body in such a way as to improve and foster one's mental capacities. Temperance and generally a restricted diet are part and parcel of this care. “He ate [...] very sparingly, abstaining mostly from animal food,” Alcott writes (227). Alcott even thinks Plato a useful resource for the struggles of contemporary “women's rights movements” (234). Fittingly, the comparatively long discussion of Plato is followed up with short but related musings on Socrates and particularly the “Socratic Conversation” (235). Alcott thinks Berkeley is the best modern exemplar of the Socratic-Platonic dialogic tradition. For Alcott, he also happens to be Britain's most accomplished idealist.

The mystic, theosophical tradition, particularly in the vein of Jakob Boehme, which he traces back to Plotinus, is another important source for Alcott. He even goes so far as to say that contemporary Boehme-inspired contributions are on par with the writings of the St. Louis Hegelians (237). Alcott strives for a synthesis in which “theosophical and modern scientific knowledge is, as it were, all in living activity” (243; Alcott is quoting from one of Christopher Walton's letters here). Henry Crabb Robinson's diary, which he deems to be “the best personal and literary picture of the times in which he lived” (245), is interesting to Alcott primarily as a resource on the British Romantics, particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge. Unsurprisingly, Alcott sees Coleridge as one of the foremost present-day Platonists and values him particularly for introducing and spreading the thought of the German idealists in the English-speaking world. Alcott then proceeds to quote passages from Coleridge on Plato and poetry. This is followed by quotations of a handful of John Selden's sayings from his Table Talk. The “August” section then closes with Alcott praising women as particularly attuned to the kind of intuitive thought he ceaselessly advocates: “Divination,” he writes, “seems heightened and raised to its highest power in woman” (253). Of course, this is because Alcott believes that “sentiment is feminine, thought masculine” (254). For illustration, Alcott provides respective lines from Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles.

The final section of the book opens with a brief sketch of Walden Pond and its surroundings and, of course, reminiscences of Thoreau. In fact, much of the section consists of passages culled from Thoreau's writings. Given that he takes them to display an outright religious quality, it is fitting that Alcott continues with his own thoughts on the ideal church, which, of course, is a church in line with Alcott's holistic idealism: It is “to touch the whole man, quicken all his powers into beauty and strength of exercise” (266). Consonant with his pedagogical ideas, Alcott also wants the church to reserve more time and space for children. He even quotes Martin Luther in this context: “There is no greater obstacle in the way of piety than neglect in the training of the young”(268). The book fittingly ends with a chapter on idealism. This final chapter brings together and sums up once more Alcott's general philosophical outlook: It is imperative to try and reach beyond the limits of the senses and of rational thought in order to attain “the mount of vision and of renovating ideas” (271). To do so, enthusiasm is needed. It is also a lifelong task – hence the importance of an ongoing, holistic education, for “[w]ho ceases to aspire, dies” (271). To attain the realm of ideas or the divine is tantamount to becoming one with it, for only “as we become One Personally with Him do we know Him and partake of His attributes” (272). Education thus amounts to a veritable becoming-God. It is to touch our existence and be one with it.

Last updated on June 14th, 2024

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