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Passages from the American Notebooks
Nathaniel Hawthorne
1835-1853
(The exercise of a young author’s pen creates images of the New England landscape and its people.)
Mrs. Sophia Hawthorne, after the death of her husband in 1864, respected his wish that no biography be written of him. However, in lieu of this, she released to an eager public three successive volleys of Passages from his journals. Those written in America were published first, and are perhaps the most interesting in that they focus on his home state of Massachusetts and the early years of his literary career (his thirties).
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
1854
(A philosopher and naturalist returns from the woods to deliver a message: Wake Up! Think! Live Meaningfully!)
The account of Thoreau’s temporary retreat from civilization and the philosophy he developed and tested during that time, is perhaps the greatest single work in American literature. I say this not so much because he was right, not because he got the nature of the cosmos straighter than this or that thinker. Rather, this work is great—I say perhaps the greatest our country has produced—primarily because in it we see a man who is awake. It is not what he gets right that is earthshattering here, but rather the fact that he sees that there is a right to be gotten, so to speak, and that he bursts the strictures of convention to strive for it, and that he so eloquently exhorts us to do the same. Thoreau here is a crusader for examining our lives, for living well, for life itself! In a world of so many petty tensions, so many lures into complexity and distraction which decompose any central vision or purpose in our lives, Thoreau opens his eyes, looks about him, and realizes the great harm we are slipping into unaware. He sees the “quiet desperation” of people about him, and the empty catalog of assumptions and dry truths they (we!) harbor in place of a real, living, mission statement. He, as if by a sudden revelation, is horrified at the masses of humans like lemmings who are content to follow the path over the cliff into the sea of meaningless existence simply because the way is worn clean and so is the easiest to tread.
July’s People
May 25, 2014 / Leave a comment
Nadine Gordimer
1981
(A white South African family in danger of racial violence flees to a village under the protection of their black servant.)
You like to have some cup of tea?—
She runs.
This is the novel. Rather, between these two lines lies the novel, and these two (the first and last lines) are the tail ends of two realities that rest on either side of the novel and overlap within it. The pre-novel reality is a comfortable family in South Africa under apartheid, served by a black man July (I almost wrote “Friday”), “as his kind has always done for their kind”. The post-novel reality is an unwritten future, a frenzied sprint to the unknown, where the white mother, in some ways the central figure of the family, flees either to her violent death or to her salvation. Which of these she finds is not known, was not written, never came to pass. The novel is not about an ending, and so this is not a spoiler. The novel is about the boiling metamorphosis in process. As the novel’s epigraph by Antonio Gramsci indicates, the goal is to portray the “morbid symptoms” of a time when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”. The first line is the old that is dying, and the last line is the failing-to-be-born of the new. In a terseness and simplicity of prose not unlike that of her countryman Alan Paton, the eventual Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer unwraps the space between these two lines, guiding us through the development from one into the other.
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