Can hardly wait to head back to MA this year to visit Catharine. Not just is it great to see her whenever, but since it’s summer that will mean a trip to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
Flying my freak flag: I love to visit cemeteries.
This weekend, we’re headed to Gettysburg, if conditions remain favorable. Her Beanness is learning all about the Civil War (her summary – Lee was great, MccLellan was a moron and Lincoln was overall great, but a toad for suspending habeas corpus). While helping her study last weekend, I raised the road trip and she seems kind of jazzed. Unfortunately for her, she doesn’t quite grasp how maudlin a trip it’s gonna be. But, that’s okay.
Few things I’ve kept from the light of my life; mommy’s propensity to commune with the dead seemed a good place to start.
Across from Cath and Jerry’s former home was an ancient, ruinous cemetery – very small. Like so many developments, these beautiful, monstrously huge homes were built across every square foot, save this tiny little corner on the hill. Some of the graves are so worn you cannot read the headstones; others are in bunches, one large and several tiny, entire families wiped out in the same few weeks. I assume they died from something heinous: typhoid, malaria….the kind of thing that used to create mass family funerals. Amongst these simple granite markers were larger, more ornate headstones, much more recent – soldiers from both world wars and Vietnam.
But, without a moment’s hesitation, I’d have to say Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord is my version of Mecca. First, it’s huge and steeped in American history. Not just any old piece of history, though: literary history. Thoreau and his family are buried there, moved from The New Burying Ground on Bedford Street, (yes, that’s really the cemetery name) along with his father, brother John and sister Helen.
Down the winding dirt path a bit are the Alcotts — all four Little Women and both parents, Bronson and Abigail, along with a few of the girls’ children and spouses.
Across the way are Ralph Waldo Emerson and family. Emerson’s grave bears the inscription: “The passive master lent his hand to the vast soul which o’er him planned.” It’s from one of his poems.
Some of the markers for his family are nothing but stones smaller than basketballs. Ditto for the Alcott markers, many of which just carry initials.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Daniel Chester French are also part of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, but the latter, not an author, is not on Author’s Ridge. His is a flat, gold-plated marker, ornate and befitting the man who sculpted The Lincoln Memorial.
Save for Hawthorne, who parodied the movement in one of his books, most of the writers were part of the Transcendentalist movement, founded by Emerson and Bronson Alcott. Believers in the theory that God speaks to all human beings through nature and intuition, these individuals graves stand in testament to their understanding that all of nature carries a spiritual basis. You really can feel it, standing on Author’s Ridge, surrounded by woods, acres adorned with very little that’s ostentatious or ornate.
It’s one of the most serene places I’ve ever visited; just feels different. One cause of that is the strict code of rules and regulations regarding temporary decorations: no artificial flowers, wreaths, vigil lights or mulch allowed.
But it’s more than superficial. Here, in one small area, are some of the greatest thinkers and creative literary talents ever in America. Their theories on education, their practices and philosophies helped shape this country. For anyone who cares a whit about writing, even walking among their headstones is a moving, breathtaking experience.
I found myself wondering what they would say about present day America. Louisa May Alcott would likely cheer at the rights women have earned since 1888. Her father, and Emerson, would bemoan the state of literature and what passes for education. But Thoreau. . .Thoreau would weep upon learning what we’ve done to our land. Probably all of them would. Little of the spirituality of nature can be located in the ubiquitous Wal-Marts that lumber across our landscape, somehow benign and frightening all at once.
They are likely happier where they lay, amidst their peers under shards of sun peeking down from between the looming oaks and maples, unaware of how differently America now defines progress.
