dual personalities

As expected, we kept our Valentine’s Day simple. I purchased pink tapers at the hardware store (very romantic — DN asked if they were Advent candles, haha) and he picked up fancy cheeses and tulips at the grocery store. I made an easy but showy dessert, the recipe for which is perfectly portioned for two. And I ironed my tablecloth that has the most red and pink in it.

All in all, we had a lovely evening that centered on enjoying one another’s company. How nice!

The rest of the weekend mostly featured reading and lounging about. I recently picked up The Scarlet Letter and have just started re-reading it, starting with its prefatory “The Custom-House” sketch. While I do love the genius of Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne is, by contrast, appealingly easy to read. Hawthorne feels like a kindred spirit.

From a trip to Salem, MA in 2013

I just loved how he describes getting an office job after several years of co-mingling with the New England literature gang:

It contributes greatly toward a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate. . . . I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreary brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile influence of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow’s hearth-stone; — it was time, at length, that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott.

Poor Bronson Alcott–ouch! (But also LOL.)

Hawthorne also writes about later losing his job at the Custom-House after Zachary Taylor was elected President (and subsequently fired a number of political appointees).

But who can see an inch into futurity, beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell!

The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom, or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident that has befallen him.

Always a good reminder, eh? Hawthorne’s “making the best” is that he returned to the literary scene and wrote The Scarlet Letter, and we should be very glad for it. I’m only a bit into the novel proper, but I have a feeling it will “hit a little different,” as they say, than it did in college. Hester Prynne is quite the woman.

*All quotes from “The Custom-House”