It's A Different Time: Today's Disrespect of Intelligence

Concord Days is an interesting little book, if you're interested in the Alcott family, or the Transcendentalists, or about how an intellectual thought in New England circa 1870, and a little before. It was originally published in 1872. The one I read is a reprint of the original, and therefore a little hard on the eyes, since the original wasn't perfectly printed to begin with. It's got pages that were unnecessarily bolded and overinked, and other pages where the print is slim, and under-inked. Some pages were in the middle. Alcott was not as heavily published as were his popular daughters, and this shows. He was highly influential, especially in education, and highly respected by his Transcendentalist peers, but this does not necessarily translate into sales.

You would probably have to have an interest in one of the above things to get something out of this, but it's a quaint little hardcover book, and it's an honest writing of the thoughts of a smart, influential guy in Concord, MA and environs, including Harvard, southern to central NH, and...well, that's about it.

Amos Alcott was the father of Louisa May Alcott and her sisters. They had an interesting family and a curious dynamic. The family lived in poverty for a long time, until Louisa May started writing every single thing she could think of and the money started pouring in. (She wrote a lot more than Little Women. She wrote under many different names, fiction and nonfiction, and her first big successes were with novels of passion and of heaving bosoms, and the like. Picture a woman writing Harlequin Romances who one day wrote a classic about smart, independent young women and a quaint family life, and that's her.) Even after that, the family was more than happy to have their patriarch remain essentially unemployed, which allowed him to become a man of letters and thought, and to be respected as such. As I mentioned, this does not always translate to books sold, or to profitable lectures. But this was an altruistic family, and the mother and daughters were seriously happy to be the breadwinners as the father wrote letters in his study, and education tracts to pop-up education and lifestyle start-ups, all of which failed.

Maybe it was the time. In his journal you would see a lot of ideas about Pliny, Aristotle, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Goethe, Greeley, Plato and others. He writes about people you may not know, such as Phillips, Berkeley, Boehme, Carlyle, Landor, Pythagoras and Plutarch, and Swedenborg. He was known amongst his contemporaries, so his portrait of Hawthorne is correct. (He was as nervous and depressed as others say he was. Hawthorne would literally run away from a conversation.) He was spot on about Thoreau, who was apparently a bit of a respected drifter who didn't actually drift, but looked and acted like he did. Thoreau tested his friends, but he was not short of them. He seems to have been the type of guy who you respected for being so independent, so non-9 to 5, but whom you also wanted to tell to stop being such a bum and to get a damn job.

Alcott had the ability (and the time) to just read and write and think, without anyone telling him to get a damn job you bum, which makes me jealous as hell, though I wouldn't necessarily want to write about what he wrote about. He was amongst the last of the wave of privileged guys who would write about Ideas, with a capital I. He wrote about Morality, Virtue, Ideals, and the importance of one to be able to lecture well, and to be talented at smart conversation. This simply doesn't happen anymore, and it got me to wondering why.

I decided it was because my generation, and certainly the one after mine, has grown up with the idea that something is how it seems to me, but I understand it may not have the same seeming to someone else. In other words, we don't believe in universals anymore. (I know that's a universal, but let's accept the paradox and move on.) It also seems to me that nobody is renowned or respected for his intelligence anymore. Outside of luminaries like Hawking and Spielberg, who are extremely well-respected, if you are an extremely intelligent and intellectual person, but work 9-5, you'd better keep your mouth shut about it, lest people roll their eyes about you and say out loud that they don't have as much time to be smart as you do--the insinuation being that you're apparently smarter, but still somehow lesser, than they. Pointing out their latent insecurity does not help the matter any.

Sounds like personal, bitter experience, doesn't it?

Alcott was apparently one of those guys, but was well-respected, sought after, and appreciated for it. Such is simply not the case anymore. Period. He would not be so treated today; I guarantee it.

But I would also feel uncomfortable writing about Virtue and Morality these days. It is a different time. It's not the fault of political-correctness, exactly, as much as it is an ingrained understanding of the fallacy of universals. Morality for me, in suburban-hell New England, and Morality for the poverty-stricken of Ferguson, Missouri, for example, are probably two different things. Or, in other words, Yes, it's wrong to steal, but when you're starving and nobody's hiring you, you break a few universal rules every now and then. What's more Moral: to watch your children starve, or to steal some food for them?

And, yes, you have to be a man of leisure to have the time to contemplate Morality and Virtue and to write about it. I'd love to have that time, and I don't fault those who have it. For me, when I come home from work, I'm exhausted, mentally and psychologically, if not physically, and it's all I can do to write my short stories and novels and to send them out. I don't have a household of daughters supporting me financially and emotionally, and I'm not sure I'd let them if I did.

It's a different time.

Does it have to be? I don't know. I'm assuming I have more time (though it sure as hell doesn't seem it) to simply read as often as I do, and to write as many book reviews and blog entries as I do, and to write everything else that I do, and I've been told more than once (always with bitterness) that it's because I don't have a large family to support. I acknowledge this, as it's not wrong, though I could do without the tone that often comes with it. Not having a huge family is of course a choice as well.

And here we come back to Alcott. It's a different time. For the better, or not, I don't know.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne--Don't Be Instructed by the Uninstructed

Photo: (Top) Title page of the First Edition, 1850, from the book's Wikipedia page.
Photo: First Editions, from flavorwire.com.

I have a lot of little things to say about this--about its plot, themes, images, metaphors and writing--so let's just bullet them:

--There was a stretch of fifteen pages (in my book, pages 66-81) of straight narration, with no dialogue at all.  And there were many other shorter stretches of straight narration as well.  This simply wouldn't happen in a book today, unless it was by a magic realist like Salman Rushdie, or someone working within an arcane specialty.  Certainly not by a popular novelist, which Hawthorne was in his day.  Literary agents and publishers would insist, perhaps correctly, that it simply wouldn't hold the reader's attention.

--Considering this, the book is remarkably well-written.  Though it did take me quite awhile to read it because of this fireplace-narration style, it was still well done.  Just hard to get through.  Some of the sentences are brilliant, such as: "...the children of the Puritans looked up from their play,--or what passed for play with those sombre little urchins..."

--Hawthorne was not a lover of Puritans, or of their children.  It comes across as an amusing bias in the book.  You get such straight-laced and sincere narration with such an author-reading voice, then he springs a sentence like the last one on you.  Tolkein did the same, but in more sleep-inducing ways.

--His descriptions and details are ingenious.  I missed them in a glazed stupor because of the blocks of narration, but then one hit me as I read it, and then I went back to see what else I'd missed in my reading doze.  Often, it was a lot.  Describing Pearl's clothing as a purposeful, fiery, living representation of the scarlet letter was a strong idea: "So much strength of coloring...was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth."  That's good writing.

--The narration as it unfolds is more or less a series of vignettes starring Hester Prynne.  As such, this would make a good Tarantino film, with a few flourishes, of course.  And you'd have to give her an Uzi.

--Arthur Dimmesdale>Hester Prynne>Pearl = Thomas Jefferson>Sally Hemmings>their descendants, if you follow the drift of the hypocrisy (though, in fairness, Jefferson--as far as I know--didn't give long racist rants).  You could go there with today's conservative, gay-bashing Republicans and their male lovers as well.  The Scarlet Letter is a political novel, too, because the religious leaders of the day were also the political leaders of the day.  That's one of the points of the book: separation of Church and State, after all.

--Art imitates life.  Read the last two sentences above again, and then consider the reasons politicians say they oppose gay marriage, or any number of other societal things.  Anytime you invoke God to pass, or to not pass, legislation, you're violating the most simple and most powerful tenet of this, or of any other, democracy: Separation of Church and State.

--Emma Stone as a child would've made a perfect, intelligent, sassy and fiery Pearl, just as she did as a quasi-Hester Prynne in Easy A.

--Hawthorne went out of his way to pile on the hypocrisy.  The real Governor Bellingham, for example, served in office for just one year before his Puritan constituents threw him out.  His crime?  He married a woman who had been betrothed to a friend of his.  (Notice that the woman's preference mattered little.)

--There's a remarkable benefit of having to wear the scarlet letter.  Since everyone will think badly of you anyway, why not behave as boldly as you wish, all the time?  The need to impress others won't exist.

--And no one will not tell you to behave this way, since you're too sinful to be spoken to anyway.

--Hawthorne had no love for the clergy, of any time.  When Hester visits the Governor, he's in a meeting with a few ministers, and the servant (an enslaved and bonded freeman, but that's another point) says to her: "Yea, his honorable worship is within.  But he hath a godly minister or two with him, and likewise a leech."  The leech turns out to be her worthy husband, Roger Chillingworth.  Dimmesdale is representative of Hawthorne's attitude towards the clergy--when he was in a positive mood.

--Speaking of Dimmesdale, his speech imploring Hester to reveal the name of the father, in front of the populace in the beginning of the book, is an ingenious scene of dichotomy.  Forced by his superior to pull the name from her, he's 100% hoping she will say it, and, of course, 100% hoping she won't, at the same time.

--Her husband was indeed chilling, and her lover was, in fact, a bit dim: "Then, after long search into the minister's dim interior..." (107).  I wrote that observation long before I read that quote; good to know I don't just pull this stuff out of the air.

--"On the wall hung a row of portraits...All were characterized by the sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on; as if they were the ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of living men."  There are dozens of great passages like this.  Genius.

--The image of the armor acting like a funhouse mirror and making the A of gigantic proportion on her, as if "...she seemed hidden behind it" was another great touch in a book filled with such written flourishes.

--The home that the two men shared with the old woman was adorned with tapestry depicting the story of David and Bathsheba.  Again going out of his way to pile on the metaphors and symbols of guilt and hypocrisy, Hawthorne gives us the famous biblical story of the great man who slept with a minor man's wife, hanging in the house of the man who did the same.

--"When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived" (105).  Indeed.  For everyone who fervently believe that most (or, any) of the 9/11 hijackers came from Iraq, or that Obama isn't an American citizen, or that he is Islamic, or a socialist, pay heed.  Don't be instructed by the uninstructed.

--Birthers.  Please.

--Speaking of that, when Romney blurted something Birther recently, it told me he knew he was a rat on a sinking ship.  McCain, for all his faults, was a good, moral man who refused (unlike his pretty but empty VP) to run a campaign based on purposeful misinformation and outright lies.  He even told an audience that Obama was a good, kind man, and not a terrorist.  Mitt should pay heed.  The blind leading the blind, there.

--Mitt.  Please.  At least Clinton didn't actually ask to be called Bubba.  Even a reference to baseball can't save this guy in my eyes.

More to come.  A truly great novel, worth the effort.