Books and Ideas (25)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Tales and Sketches. Parts One, Two, Three and Four. Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Continued)

“Drowne’s Wooden Image.” “On the supposition that in every human spirit there is imagination, sensibility, creative power, genius, which according to circumstances, may either be developed in this world, or shrouded in a mask of dullness until another state of being. To our friend Drowne, there came a brief season of excitement…rendered him a genius of that one occasion, but, quenched in disappointment, left him again the mechanical carver in wood, without the power even of appreciating the work that his own hands had wrought.”

“A Select Party.” “…a splendid library, the volumes of which were inestimable, because they consisted not of actual performances, but of the works which the authors only planned, without ever finding the happy season to achieve them….”

“A Book of Autographs.” “…Southern gentlemen are more addicted to a flourish of the pen beneath their names, than those of the North.”

“Rappaccini’s Daughter.” “…that he cares infinitely more for science than for mankind…. Patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment…would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest…for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard-seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge. This lovely woman had been nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them, that she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence. He could not quite forget the bouquet that withered in her grasp.” Beatrice to her father Giovanni: “Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”

“P’s Correspondence.” “…think much about graves, with the long grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones of people who made noise enough in their day…. It behooves actors to vanish from the scene betimes, being, at best, but painted shadows flickering on the wall, and empty sounds that echo another’s thought….”

“Main Street.” “The pavements of the Main-Street must be laid over the red man’s grave. What was then the woodland pathway, but has long since grown into a busy street…. Dusk and then the starless night, to brood over the street; and summon forth again the bellman, with his lantern casting a gleam about his footsteps, to pace wearily from corner to corner, and shout drowsily the hour to drowsy or dreaming ears. Their fathers and grandsires tell them [the youth] how, within a few years past, the forest stood here with but a lonely track beneath its tangled shade; vain legend; they cannot make it true and real to their conceptions…. Nothing impresses them except their own experience.”

“Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive romance.” “He does not laugh like a man that is glad. Did you never hear of Ethan Brand? The man that went in search of the Unpardonable Sin? A man who, on his own confession had committed the only crime for which Heaven could afford no mercy. What is the Unpardonable sin? asked the lime-burner. The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man, and reverence for God and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims. Unshrinkingly. I accept the retribution.”

“The Great Stone Face.” “True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another.” “If an old prophecy should come to pass, answered his mother, we may see a man, some time or other, with exactly such a face as that.” “Behold! Behold! Ernest is himself the likeness of the Great Stone Face.”