A Mind on Fire

Throughout his writing life, Richardson advocated for the sufficiency of the here and now over some imagined historical greatness lost in the mists of time-this even though, as one of the great literary biographers of his era, he was a connoisseur of the past. Ignoring Thoreau's youth, his family influences, and even his psychological development, Richardson tells us little of Henry David, focusing exclusively on the fully formed Thoreau-the Thoreau of Walden, of the Journal, and of his other books, essays, and letters. Richardson corrects all of these modern misunderstandings while proving that a great mind at work is no less exciting, no less passionately stirring, than the life of a military hero or a saint, and no less wild or surprising in its movement than the forces of nature. Toward the end of his life, as he was dying of painful heart trouble, James sent a testy letter to his friend Henry Adams, excoriating him for having applied the second law of thermodynamics in a darkly deterministic way to human history in his 1910 Letter to American Teachers of History. [...]like the Concord thinkers, James believed, in Richardson's words, "not just that our minds are active rather than passive but that mind is activity": humans are not merely victims of circumstance and pawns in a cosmic game of chess, but actively shape their own lives and worlds.