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The man who met Dickinson

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https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...on/613357/

EXCERPTS: . . . Dickinson’s letter set into motion a correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson that lasted almost a quarter of a century. Eight years after writing her initial letter, on August 16, 1870, Dickinson and Higginson finally met face-to-face. Higginson’s visit would be no ordinary call for Dickinson—not that she received many guests. [...] Nearly 40 years old, she was more patient, less insistent, and more forgiving of perceived slights from those close to her. ... In her letters, Higgison had noticed, she no longer signed her name on a card slipped inside the envelope—a game played as much for effect as reticence. Largely gone, too, were the callow signatures of “Your Gnome” and “Your Scholar.” Now she signed her name with a single word: “Dickinson.” That is who she had become.

Higginson was excited and nervous about paying calls. As a boy, he was shy around women outside his family. [...] But Higginson had plenty of questions for Dickinson, chief among them inquiries about her seclusion. At times, her talent made him reluctant to answer her letters, aware he never could match her artfulness. ... Higginson thought that she needed someone—a person who admired her, even if he did not always understand what she was saying. ... Higginson was exhausted as he prepared to meet Dickinson in her Amherst home. He had spent the past year writing two books. ... From where he stood, he could see the train depot and the distant line of the Pelham hills. He knocked, presented his card, and was ushered into a dark parlor on the left. Then he waited.

[...] Once they sat, Dickinson began talking and she did not stop. ... She wondered how people got through their days without thinking. “How do most people live without any thoughts,” she said. “There are many people in the world (you must have noticed them in the street) How do they live. How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning.” She was full of aphorisms, sentences that seemed to have been crafted earlier in her mind and that she wanted to share. “Women talk: men are silent: that is why I dread women; Truth is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it; Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds?”

At times, Dickinson seemed self-conscious and asked Higginson to jump in. But every time he tried, she was off again, and words tumbled out, almost uncontrollably. He tried to recall every phrase, every thought, even her tone, humor, and asides. “My father only reads on Sunday—he reads lonely & rigorous books,” she said. Once, she recalled, her brother, Austin, brought home a novel that they knew their father would not condone. Austin hid it under the piano cover for Dickinson to find. When she was young, she said, and read her first real book, she was in ecstasy. “This then is a book!” she had exclaimed. “And are there more of them!” She boasted about her cooking and said she made all the bread for the family. Puddings too. “People must have puddings,” she said. The way she said it—so dreamy and abstracted—sounded to Higginson as though she were talking about comets.

Dickinson said her life had not been constrained or dreary in any way. “I find ecstasy in living,” she explained. The “mere sense of living is joy enough.” When at last the opportunity arose, Higginson posed the question he most wanted to ask: Did you ever want a job, have a desire to travel or see people? The question unleashed a forceful reply. “I never thought of conceiving that I could ever have the slightest approach to such a want in all future time.” Then she loaded on more. “I feel that I have not expressed myself strongly enough.”

Dickinson reserved her most striking statement for what poetry meant to her, or, rather, how it made her feel. “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry,” she said. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.” Dickinson was remarkable. Brilliant. Candid. Deliberate. Mystifying. After eight years of waiting, Higginson was finally sitting across from Emily Dickinson of Amherst, and all he wanted to do was listen.

It struck Higginson that the time he spent with Dickinson that day had been an act of self-definition for her: Her torrent of words was like a personal and literary manifesto. [...] With a hundred thoughts whirling in his head, Higginson retraced his steps back to the hotel. He needed to go to bed. But before turning in, he compiled notes, trying to recall it all, and made a quick entry in his diary. Meeting Emily Dickinson quite equaled my expectation, he wrote. It had been a momentous day, one he would never forget. As he turned down the lamp, he hoped he would be able to calm his mind and get to sleep. He wanted to wake up early before catching the train to Vermont... (MORE - details)
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