In Infinite Good: The Mountains of William James, author and naturalist, J. Parker Huber, follows the famed naturalist and philosopher William James sojourns in New England. The Adirondacks―where neither Muir nor Thoreau tread―James revealed, had the greatest influence on his life. He made annual pilgrimages there in late nineteenth century. He bought land there, as well as a farm at the south base of Mount Chocorua in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which became his country home.
Drawing on James’s faithfully recorded itineraries, author J. Parker Huber provides comprehensive and well-documented summaries about the excursions of William James and his family. William James became increasingly aware of nature’s beneficence. In 1872, then thirty, he confided to Henry in two letters what he had drawn from his Maine coast experiences that summer. In the first, of 24 August, he wrote that the “nervouspuckers” of his mind had been “smoothed out gently & fairly by the sweet influences of many a lie on a hill top at mt. Desert with sky & sea & Islands before me, by many a row, and a couple of sails, and by my bath and siesta on the blazing sand this morn.” And, again in the fall of 1872, he wrote that he had “never so much as this summer felt the soothing and hygienic effects of nature upon the human spirit.” Earlier his enjoyment of nature had been a “luxury, but this time t’was as a vital food, or medicine.” And so it remained for his life.
J Parker Huber provides a fascinating look at the prominent philosopher’s love of the mountains and the solace he found there. Readers will appreciate the scholarly research, but also participate in the alpinist’s adventures and revelations.
J. Parker Huber has been following Thoreau throughout New England since 1974. He is the editor of Elevating Ourselves: Thoreau on Mountains (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), author of A Wanderer All My Days: John Muir in New England (Green Frigate Books, 2007), and the author of The Wildest Country: A Guide to Thoreau’s Maine. He lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.
