A Season of Whispers

a ghost and he will laugh. People, like the stones in a partition between acres, may touch and rest upon one another, but ultimately each is a separate thing, alone and uncommunicative. Every stone believes its own story of how it came to rest there and only infrequently do those narratives overlap. Minerva was reminded of this years later when she read a newspaper report that the man she had known as Tom Lyman had escaped from incarceration at Wethersfield. Yet a closer reading of the story showed that escape was the reporter’s assumption, while the warden himself, perhaps protective of his reputation, only admitted Lyman was missing.

What we encounter in the night we encounter by ourselves, whether it is murder, memory, violin music, or voices plural, whispering to us through prison walls.

Further Reading

Readers interested in learning more about transcendentalist utopian settlements may want to start with some of the semi-fictionalized testaments written by former residents. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, inspired by his time at Brook Farm, is as dry and funny today as it was in 1852, and Louisa May Alcott’s “Transcendental Wild Oats” (1873) is a satirical send-up of her father’s experiment at Fruitlands.

I also suggest Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1836) and Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking” (1862) for understanding the transcendentalist mindset. Really, anything by Thoreau is recommended.

Philip F. Gura’s American Transcendentalism: A History (2007) is a solid primer on transcendentalism in general. Finally, if you can find it, there is Edith Roelker Curtis’s history of Brook Farm, A Season in Utopia (1961), now long out of print.

— JK

About the Author

Jackson Kuhl is the author of the Revolutionary War biography Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer and the fiction collection The Dead Ride Fast. Kuhl has written for Atlas Obscura, Connecticut Magazine, the Hartford Courant, National Geographic News, Reason, and other publications. He lives in coastal Connecticut.

For more information, visit www.jacksonkuhl.com.

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