The Symbol of Our Labor

Hidden wisdom and mysterious revelations.

The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail in becoming real-life farmers, but that we should probably cease to be anything else. While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor. It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship.

Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in the field, to let the wind exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth. In this point of view, matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated.

It is very true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene of earth and sky. There was, at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted aspect, on the face of Nature, as if she had been taken by surprise and seen at unawares, with no opportunity to put off her real look, and assume the mask with which she mysteriously hides herself from mortals. But this was all.

The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

Painting; Van Gogh,  The Sower

The Spell of the Spoken Word

Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind so distinctly that no utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be conscious of the same thought, in which one or both take the most profound interest; but as long as it remains unspoken, their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something sunken in its bed.

But speak the word, and it is like bringing up a drowned body out of the deepest pool of the rivulet, which has been aware of the horrible secret all along, in spite of its smiling surface.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

Painting: Caspar David Friedrich, ca. 1832

A Glimpse of the Master's Genius

An idea that might vanish in the twinkling of an eye is captured on an old scrap of paper

There were curious little treasures of art and bits of antiquity strewn about. Among them were gems, small figures of bronze, medieval carvings in ivory and even a sample of the soil of Rome.

As interesting as any of these relics was a large portfolio of old drawings, some of which, in the opinion of their possessor, bore evidence on their faces of the touch of master-hands. Very ragged and ill conditioned they mostly were, yellow with time, and tattered with rough usage; and, in their best estate, the designs had been scratched rudely with pen and ink, on coarse paper, or, if drawn with charcoal or a pencil, were now half rubbed out.

You would not anywhere see rougher and homelier things than these. But this hasty rudeness made the sketches only the more valuable; because the artist seemed to have bestirred himself at the pinch of the moment, snatching up whatever material was nearest, so as to seize the first glimpse of an idea that might vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Thus, by the spell of a creased, soiled, and discolored scrap of paper, you were enabled to steal close to an old master, and watch him in the very effervescence of his genius.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

Drawing: Rembrandt, Self-portrait; pen, brush and ink on paper, c. 1628

Heavy framework rests on shaky foundation

Musings on the exterior presentment of counterfeit rights

Matthew Maule, the wizard, had been foully wronged out of his homestead, if not out of his life.

As for Matthew Maule's posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct. For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had suffered so unjust a death.

To all appearance, they were a quiet, honest, well-meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them; or if, at their own fireside, they transmitted from father to child any hostile recollection of the wizard's fate and their lost patrimony, it was never acted upon, nor openly expressed. Nor would it have been singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the Seven Gables was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was rightfully their own.

There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds.

Such is the case now, after so many ancient prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be proud, and the low were content to be abased.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

Painting: Lawren Harris (1885 - 1970), Pine Tree and Red House

Dancing to the same tune

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

The music box began to scatter its melodies abroad. To complete the sum of splendid attractions wherewith it presented itself to the public, there was a company of little figures, whose sphere and habitation was inside the music box, and whose principle of life was the music which the contraption made it its business to grind out.

In all their variety of occupation—the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by her cow—this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance. You turned a crank; and, behold! every one of these small individuals started into the most curious vivacity.

The cobbler wrought upon a shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier waved his glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jolly toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book with eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro along the page; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted gold into his strong-box—all at the same turning of a crank. Yes; and, moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on her lips!

Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement—however serious, however trifling—all dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affair was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was the cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out; nor was there a drop less of brandy in the toper's bottle, nor a drop more of milk in the milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser's strong-box, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to become wise.

Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier for the maiden's granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.

—Adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of the Seven Gables

Painting: Edgar Degas, Dancers in Pink

The Art of Reading

A Personal Account of an Ongoing Relationship With Words

I've always been fond of dictionaries for as long as I can remember. As a teenager, one Christmas, I asked a relative for a dictionary as my holiday present. It was a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, an edition in hard cover with red cloth.

Words have a life and a history, and just as with people their best attributes can be hidden in nuance. Writers, whose stock-in-trade is words, recognize the importance of giving words their full due. The best writers can make reading a satisfying, delightful and an almost delicious experience, all because of words.

The high school I attended assigned Victorian Era books like Oliver Twist. This was thrown in among other more readable books or what I then considered more “normal” fare. At the time, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter seemed to me like an excellent choice to kill a young person’s interest in reading and literature.

Some years ago, at a cocktail party, I ran into someone who, as it turned out, was a high school English teacher. Our conversation led me to wonder out loud the point of assigning The Scarlet Letter to teenagers who don’t have the vocabulary to understand, let alone appreciate, the work. Her reply was something to the effect that the students understood the issues raised by the book and showed great interest in discussing them.

I simply nodded in agreement and left the conversation there. When I was in high school, it was only because of the book’s Monarch Notes, I was able to pick up—nothing distinct mind you, just—faint hints and clues as to what the book was about and the important questions it supposedly addressed.

I’ve now read The Scarlet Letter three times and I’ve formed a deep appreciation for its literary merit. I am also more convinced than ever that assigning it to the average high school freshman class is a disservice to the students.

At some point in college, I decided I wouldn’t let a single word pass me by if I didn’t have a ready definition for it on the tip of my tongue. This is a different standard than having a vague idea what a word means. For a period of what may have been two years, I carried a Little Oxford English Dictionary with me everywhere I went. It had a hard cover and was smaller than an average paperback. It contained the great majority of the words I looked up.

I was looking up words all the time. It’s a wonder I ever finished reading anything. Eventually, looking up so many words must have had some positive effect because I stopped relying on my Little Oxford. It was sometime after this, I had occasion to visit one of my university professors in his office. I was working on a paper and we needed to discuss its progress.

As I remember now, years later, it was a decent-sized office. The only other thing I remember about it is that in the office, up on a stand—or maybe it was an improvised lectern—sat a huge unabridged dictionary. It is the kind of dictionary you only see in the reference section of libraries, always opened somewhere in the middle as if a book like that isn’t meant to remain closed. It is the kind of book that has perhaps a four inch spine and if you had to venture a guess, you might say it easily weighs between 15 and 20 pounds.

Later on, after leaving the professor’s office—and the impression of the over-sized dictionary having settled in—I remember thinking to myself, “So this is how the pros do it.”

I have never owned an unabridged dictionary but I can certainly appreciate its value. I have never lost my fondness for words and their meaning. The habit of constantly looking up words still haunts me and to this day it slows me down when I read.

Ereaders have brought the art of reading to the information age. Today, the definition of 99 percent of all words is only one touch away when we read. You don’t need to lug around a Little Oxford and the Oxford English Dictionary is no longer published in printed editions.

Painting: Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954)

Do you have a special relationship to books, words and reading?

Dawn Kissed her Brow

Phoebe slept, on the night of her arrival, in a chamber that looked down on the garden of the old house. It fronted towards the east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light came flooding through the window, and bathed the dingy ceiling and paper-hangings in its own hue.

There were curtains to Phoebe's bed; a dark, antique canopy, and ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been rich, and even magnificent, in its time; but which now brooded over the girl like a cloud, making a night in that one corner, while elsewhere it was beginning to be day.

The morning light, however, soon stole into the aperture at the foot of the bed, betwixt those faded curtains. Finding the new guest there,—with a bloom on her cheeks like the morning's own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs, as when an early breeze moves the foliage,—the dawn kissed her brow. It was the caress which a dewy maiden—such as the Dawn is, immortally—gives to her sleeping sister, partly from the impulse of irresistible fondness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now to unclose her eyes.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

Painting: Jean Francois Millet, Sleeping Nude (1844)

A Pavilion Among the Clouds

When Georgiana recovered consciousness she found herself breathing an atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had recalled her from her deathlike faintness. The scene around her looked like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of beautiful apartments not unfit to be the secluded abode of a lovely woman.

The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains, which imparted the combination of grandeur and grace that no other species of adornment can achieve; and as they fell from the ceiling to the floor, their rich and ponderous folds, concealing all angles and straight lines, appeared to shut in the scene from infinite space. For aught Georgiana knew, it might be a pavilion among the clouds.

Nathaniel Hawthorne; "The Birthmark," Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories

Painting: William Adolphe Bouguereau Return of Spring (1886)

Recondite: adj; 1) Requiring a high degree of scholarship or specialized knowledge; 2) Difficult for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend.

It Was a Cookery Book

She stood by a window, holding a book in close contiguity to her nose, as if with the hope of gaining an olfactory acquaintance with its contents, since her imperfect vision made it not very easy to read them. If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom in the mode suggested, it would certainly have been the one now in Hepzibah's hand; and the kitchen, in such an event, would forthwith have streamed with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, capons, larded partridges, puddings, cakes, and Christmas pies, in all manner of elaborate mixture and concoction. It was a cookery book, full of innumerable old fashions of English dishes, and illustrated with engravings, which represented the arrangements of the table at such banquets as it might have befitted a nobleman to give in the great hall of his castle.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

Painting: Adriaen van Utrecht (1599 - 1652)

Indescribable Grace

He made a salutation, or, to speak nearer the truth, an ill-defined, abortive attempt at curtsy. Imperfect as it was, however, it conveyed an idea, or, at least, gave a hint, of indescribable grace, such as no practised art of external manners could have attained. It was too slight to seize upon at the instant; yet, as recollected afterwards, seemed to transfigure the whole man.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

Painting: John Collier (1850 — 1934)

A Mighty River of Life

As a mere object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator feels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tedious commonplace of each man's visage, with the perspiration and weary self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of his black coat.

In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which it is made up, into one broad mass of existence,—one great life,—one collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating it.

But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing alone over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in its atoms, but in its aggregate,—as a mighty river of life, massive in its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to the kindred depth within him,—then the contiguity would add to the effect. It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

Painting: Claude Monet (1840 - 1926)

No Right to Mingle

And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tomb-stone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate—as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport—there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald's wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:—


"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Painting: Albrecht Durer (1471–1528)