Anti-Climacus

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: Hawthorne has been another new acquisition for me; somehow, I was not assigned The Scarlet Letter in high school. From what I gather of its general reception, this is possibly the only reason Hawthorne is available to me as an adult. He gets a reputation for a stereotypical New England Puritan sternness, but so far as I can see, the reputation is entirely undeserved. From what I've read (The Blithedale Romance and a number of the short stories) he comes across as possessed of the typically American sense of grim humor and satire.

I do some injustice to him by quoting the following pieces of The Blithedale Romance; he's working his way to the moral and resolution of the story, and so has serious work to do. Nevertheless, I find them both striking, so here we are.

Coverdale is, as he explains, returning to Blithedale after some time away; both parts of the passage concern alienation in some way: Coverdale's inability to focus on what is in front of him, becoming instead the nature-observer (who nevertheless cannot stray far enough away from his experience; every piece of nature becomes allegorical for what he is doing and feeling at that moment):

"The pathway of that walk still runs along, with sunny freshness, through my memory. I know not why it should be so. But my mental eye can even now discern the September grass, bordering on the pleasant roadside with a brighter verdure than while the summer heats were scorching it; the trees, too, mostly green, although here and there a branch or shrub has donned its vesture of crimson and gold a week or two before its fellows. I see the tufted barberry-bushes, with their small clusters of fruit; the toadstools, likewise,--some spotlessly white, others yellow or red,--mysterious growths, springing suddenly from no root or seed, and growing nobody can tell how or wherefore. In this respect they resembled many of the emotions in my breast. And I still see the little rivulets, chill, clear and bright, that murmured beneath the road, through subterranean rocks, and deepened into mossy pools, where the tiny fish were darting to and fro, and within which lurked the hermit-frog. But no,--I never can account for it, that, with a yearning interest to learn the upshot of all my story, and returning to Blithedale for that sole purpose, I should examine those things so like a peaceful-bosomed naturalist. ..."

The other is his genuine inability to believe in the veracity of his own memories. It would, somehow, be easier for him if there were no Blithedale, and it was just a fevered product of his imagination, than that it was a place he was once tied to intimately:

"Drawing nearer to Blithedale, a sickness of the spirits kept alternating with my flights of causeless buoyancy. I indulged in a hundred odd and extravagent conjectures. Either there was no such place as Blithedale, nor ever had been, nor any brotherhood of thoughtful laborers like what I seemed to recollect there, or else it was all changed during my absence. It had been nothing but dream-work and enchantment. I would seek in vain for the old farm-house, and for the green-sward, the potato-fields, the root-crops, and acres of Indian corn, and for all that configuration of the land which I had imagined. It would be another spot, and an utter strangeness."