Top Highlights

• The strange weather was worldwide: 1816 was the notorious “Year without a Summer,” a global climate collapse unaccountable then, but explained today by the 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, the largest volcanic event in over 1,300 years. The following spring, a strange high fog dimmed the sunlight, reddening sunsets and making sunspots vi...
• Average global temperatures dropped by nearly 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, a seemingly trivial amount, but enough to make the difference between prosperous harvests and famine from Europe to North America to China. An estimated 200,000 New Englanders had to sell or abandon their farms and move west.31
• What survives are his essays for Channing. They disappoint. Plodding, creditable, wooden and conventional, they pleased Channing well enough, but to us, they say little. In Henry Seidel Canby’s succinct phrase, Harvard “nearly ruined him as a writer.”
• This was Channing’s intention; he wanted his students to discover themselves by exploring the broader universe of their reading. As Emerson (also a Channing student) insisted, “One must be an inventor to read well.”
• Thoreau told him, “an era in my life—the morning of a new Lebenstag”—meaning one’s moral and intellectual birth, the day one’s life as a philosopher begins.