494 Three Roads Back - How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives (with Megan Marshall)
The History of Literature
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I Am the Resurrection and the Life Line
William James was very much attached to his cousin Minnie Temple who like Ellen Emerson and John Thoreau was suffering from tuberculosis. She was a magnetic creature I say creature because that's the term that both Henry and William James used to refer to this really. So it wasn't as if her death plunged him into a despair that he was unfamiliar with in fact they had both been discussing their own sense that conventional religion wasn't really a help anymore. And at the end she says that I'm after all a good deal of a pagan like that. What is one to life? And we must each try and solve it for ourselves.
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