Sleepy Hollow Cemetery: Part I
I spent the first part of this week with my wonderful aunt, uncle and cousins in Wellesley, Mass. My aunt and I have shared a lifelong bibliophile bond, and on Monday we made a pilgrimage together to Concord, the capital of American Transcendentalism.
In the mid-1800s, a roll of Concord's citizens looked like a modern required reading list: Nathaniel Hawthorne bought his house from the Alcott family, who moved to a place down the street; Louisa May would walk from her family's home up the hill to borrow books from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who could be found dining with Henry David Thoreau. In a generous act of restraint, the town today celebrates its storied literary history without resorting to shameless tourist kitsch. You can still sense the special qualities that drew all these thinkers and writers to this New England town.
We stopped at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (note: not the Sleepy Hollow of Washington Irving fame, which is located in Tarrytown, New York). Sleepy Hollow is the final resting place for all of the writers named above, as well as generations of Concord residents. They are all together on Author's Ridge: Louisa May Alcott, whose initials L.M.A. mark her place in the family plot; Emerson's stately monument; the simple marker in the Thoreau family plot that reads only "Henry."
Henry David Thoreau died in 1862 at the age of 44, after a long struggle with tuberculosis. As it became clear the end was approaching, friends and neighbors were stunned by the calm acceptance with which he faced the end of his life. His journals, read after his death, explained the peace with which he greeted death. "For joy I could embrace the earth," the naturalist had written; "I shall delight to be buried in it."
Posted on Wednesday, Dec 9, 2009
