This essay is adapted from Traversal . Sitting in the packed playhouse of the Bowery Theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side one balmy evening in the summer of 1833 is a teenage boy who can barely afford the theater — he can barely afford his bread — but there he is, rosy-cheeked — an almost baby-like rosiness that would remain with him into old age — exhilarated by the spectacle on the stage, by having made the ferry crossing from Brooklyn in the warm salty breeze, by the triumph of having bought a ticket with his own money. He has just turned fourteen. Three years earlier, he left school to begin earning his living — partly to allay his family’s perpetual financial struggle, partly to allay the numbing of his soul. “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” he will later write.…