A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit Page B

various ailments and was, if not a hypochondriac, at least exceedingly preoccupied with his symptoms.) He was a tenderhearted friend, husband, and father, and even his writings convey warmth, informality, open-mindedness, an interest in the most subtle minutiae of experience, and hope. He sometimes thought the breezy informality of his writing and talking style undermined his intellectual standing, but it made him widely accessible and popular.
    He had been ready to retire from teaching when Stanford University pursued him and paid him lavishly to come and teach in the spring of 1906 at the shining new country campus some thirty miles south of San Francisco. Delighted by the situation, he wrote to friends again and again some version of “the University is absolutely Utopian. It realizes all those simplifications and freedoms from corruption, of which seers have dreamed. Classic landscape, climate perfect, no one rich, sexes equal, manual labor practiced to some degree by all, especially by students, noble harmonious architecture, fine laboratories and collections, admirable music, all these latter things belonging to the community as such, while individuals live in the simplest conceivable way.” He added in another letter of praise, “It is verily the simple life, and democracy at its best.” James was skeptical about the possibility of Utopia but admired the efforts toward it. In an aside in The Varieties of Religious Experience , he remarked, “The Utopian dreams of social justice in which many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their impracticality and nonadaptation to present environmental conditions, analogous to the saint’s belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They help to break the general reign of hardness, and are slow leavens of a better order.” It’s a pragmatic response: a comprehensive Utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realize it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world.
    At Stanford, James lectured to a class of 300 students with as many as 150 others in attendance at times. As his public address, he delivered an early version of his great manifesto, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in late February, about six weeks before the earthquake. The issues he addressed there would be answered another way in the earthquake, and so his “Moral Equivalent” manifesto makes, with his earthquake essay, a pair examining purpose, meaning, heroism, and satisfaction in life. In its 1910 published version, it begins “The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.” He had joined the Anti-Imperialist League founded in 1898 to oppose the United States’ war against Spain and its annexation of Spain’s former colony of the Philippines. The public appetite for war had been whipped up by the newspapers during the era of sensationalistic “yellow journalism,” though James tended to believe that there was an inherent appetite for war. Many prominent intellectuals and public figures, including writer Mark Twain (who was vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League from 1901 to 1910), were ferociously opposed to the explicit amorality of that war and feared the transformation of their country into an imperial power. James moved from the question of shaping—or checking—American foreign policy to the larger question of whether war could be eliminated.
    He admitted that war was itself a sort of utopia for some, because “all the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs him. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride. . . . Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the