Free American Philosophy by John Kaag Page B

Philadelphia, and finally to Boston. This is the stuff of Transcendentalist glory: a perfect case of self-reliance. At every turn, authorities attempted to recapture O’Reilly, to return him to a life of servitude, to punish him for his participation in the Fenian uprising against British rule. This Irishman knew concretely what Emerson only conjectured in theory, that “for nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.”
    Many philosophers and writers admire this sort of individualism but want no part of it. One of the great myths of American philosophy tells us that when Thoreau was thrown into prison for protesting the Mexican-American War, Emerson came to visit him, shocked that his young friend was behind bars. “Henry,” Emerson asked, “what are you doing in there?” According to legend, Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is, what are you doing out there?” Emerson held that protesting an isolated event or trend was pointless without a full-scale spiritual reform of society, but this seemed an obvious philosophical cop-out to Thoreau, who, like O’Reilly, was loath to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. This conversation probably never occurred, but it is emblematic of the dynamic between Whitman and O’Reilly: Whitman admired the convict’s daring escape but failed to fully grasp the political realities that might cause one to be imprisoned. In response to O’Reilly’s support of Irish political rule in the 1880s, Whitman chided him for being “too concerned about the Irish vote,” failing to realize that the mere act of voting was associated with a personal and national ordeal that most white nineteenth-century American thinkers could scarcely imagine. O’Reilly was painfully aware of the censure and physical punishment used to suppress insurrection, a pain made all the more acute by the intellectuals who failed to understand his most intimate commitments.
    I flipped to Traubel’s account of the early 1890s to see if Whitman had any wisdom to share about O’Reilly’s death. Here was Whitman at his romantic best—or, as the case may be, worst: “I have not got over it yet—it was a startling story! And such a fellow! What the handsome light and shadow of the man! He had the fine port, the dark hair and eyes—of the Irish-Spanish mixture he was. When I looked at him I never wondered again why it was said to the credit of Ireland that it had come of Spain, or a thick Spanish mixture. Insomnia ‘a strange freak.’”
    â€œStrange freak” indeed. The very things one wants to escape in sleep are the very things that keep the insomniac awake. Sleeplessness had always been my most dependable nightly companion—a bedfellow intent on replaying my day’s failures into the wee hours of the morning. But I’d never come out and asked for a sleeping pill, which would have been abhorrent in my family. O’Reilly was the head of a similar family. His wife suffered from what was called “nervous prostration,” a common diagnosis for morbidly unhappy women of the nineteenth century. Chloral hydrate was prescribed to calm her nerves and make sure she slept reasonably well. Her husband hated that she had to take this sort of palliative for a mind that was supposed to be clear and constant.
    I continued to sift through the clippings and eventually found an obituary from August 10, 1890: “John Boyle O’Reilly, editor of the Pilot , died at an early hour this morning at his summer cottage, at Hall, from an overdose of chloral. He was suffering from insomnia and took the dose to produce sleep.” This put an end to my snooping for the evening; I was done. But I’d read enough to ensure that I wouldn’t sleep a wink. The reporter had done his homework carefully, describing the way O’Reilly’s wife, Mary, had found her husband sleeping soundly at the living