Monuments is a play exploring the tragic life and remarkable mind of America’s greatest philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In July of 1872, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house in Concord, Massachusetts, caught fire. His many friends and admirers raised money for repairs, and to send him on a journey across the ocean while those repairs were being made.
At the time of this voyage, Emerson was one the most famous Americans in the world, and the most famous American intellectual since Benjamin Franklin. Everywhere he went he was invited to speak and read from his works.
But his memory, which had been declining for a few years, deteriorated even more seriously after the fire. No longer considered capable of traveling alone, his daughter Ellen Tucker Emerson (who was named for his first wife) accompanied him and managed the trip.
If you read Emerson’s letters back home from this period, you would not think him limited in any way. They are for the most similar if less frequent than the letters he had been writing all of his life. But in a letter from Thebes dated January 1873, he explains there was a period several weeks during which he experienced something serious:
Alas, dear Lidian, since the above lines were scratched, a long idleness—say incapacity to write anything has held me;—not a line in my diary, not any syllable that I remember.
It is in that period that the events of the play are imagined. The memory of Ellen, Emerson’s first wife, is his Beatrice, guiding him on a journey through important events of his life, encountering other memories, including his second wife Lidian, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott.
Finally, Emerson confronts the loss of his first wife Ellen, who died of consumption only two years after they were married. This tragedy is the catalyst that somehow empowered him to break away from a life in in the church, wander Europe for a year, and finally begin a new life, one in which he would become the intellectual founding father of the nation.
Emerson, the young Emerson at least, is the most optimistic of philosophers. Yet his life was full of tragedy. This is the conflict in Emerson that has fascinated and perplexed readers (and biographers) of this brilliant, complex, kind, funny, tragic man, and inspired the playwright to create this play.
Publisher’s Note: This full-length play is the compiled version of the one-act plays in Experience. The novel version of Monuments was based on the full-length play.
About the Cover Image:
Courtesy, Metropolitan Museum of Art. The image is a detail from a painting by French artist Adrien Dauzats (1830).
ISBN: 978-1953725950
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Excerpt:
WALDO: Is that new?
HENRY: It is. A book I think. Maybe a lecture. But I think it’s a book.
WALDO: About?
HENRY: Me I suppose.
WALDO: You?
HENRY: Yes.
WALDO: You’re writing about you?
HENRY: Franklin did it. Rousseau did it.
WALDO: Of course Henry. Of course.
HENRY: Even you have done it, Mr. Emerson.
WALDO: When?
HENRY: In your essay on Experience. You wrote about little Waldo. How you felt when he. When he got sick.
WALDO: Yes. Yes. But. That was to illustrate a point. I wasn’t writing about myself.
HENRY: I am doing the same. Just on a slightly larger scale.
WALDO: What point are you illustrating?
HENRY: I’m not sure yet.
WALDO: I see.
HENRY: It’s a work in progress.
WALDO: Aren’t they all?
HENRY: It’s about…my time here.
WALDO: DaVinci said that art is never finished.
HENRY: What I have learned.
WALDO: L’arte non è mai Finita.
HENRY: What?
WALDO: DaVinci. That’s what he said. I thought you knew Italian, Henry.
HENRY: Italian? Yes. A bit. French. Latin. Spanish. German. Greek.
WALDO: And your English is coming along well too.
