7 - Transcendental Friendship

Summary

In the I 830s and 'qos, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau engaged in a prolonged series of meditations and dialogues on the meaning of friendship. At key moments, each writer decided that fundamental issues of human development could not be articulated without taking into account the role of friends. But Transcendentalist models of individuation cannot be completely reconciled with theories of social relationship; for the demands of self-reliance, especially the intuition of the “divine” depths of the self, often pull one out of the social orbit into an intense introspection. As a result, Transcendentalist discussions of friendship often emerged in response to moments of crisis (whether encounters with death, separation, or personal misunderstanding) that laid bare the specter of isolation underlying their theories. This tension (between friendship and isolation) poignantly dramatizes one of the paradoxes of Transcendentalist literary expression: its central subject matter - profound moments of imaginative and spiritual intensity - could only be described in retrospect, from the vantage point of someone who had passed through and remembered the experience.