In my American Renaissance class this morning we were talking about Thoreau's line toward the end of Walden: "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth" (222). And I said I'd take love--that Thoreau could keep his truth. Coincidentally, I ran across Hawthorne's response, in The House of Seven Gables. It comes at the moment that two characters, Holgrave and Phoebe, declare their love:
And it was in this hour, so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle was wrought, without which every human existence is a blank. The bliss which makes all things true, beautiful, and holy shone around this youth and maiden. They were conscious of nothing sad nor old. They transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two first dwellers in it. The dead man, so close beside them, was forgotten. At such a crisis, there is no death; for immortality is revealed anew, and embraces everything in its hallowed atmosphere.
It's schmaltzy, yes, but I think Hawthorne believed it fully.
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Now, for Melville's take on love... if I could only find it... ah yes, here it is: The Tartarus of Maids...
ReplyDelete"Slowly I followed the slip, inch by inch; sometimes pausing for full half a minute as it disappeared beneath inscrutable groups of the lower cylinders, but only gradually to emerge again; and so, on, and on, and on--inch by inch; all the time the main sheet growing more and more to final firmness--when, suddenly, I saw a sort of paper-fall, not wholly unlike a water-fall; a scissory sound smote my ear, as of some cord being snapped, and down dropped an unfolded sheet of perfect foolscap, with my cupid half faded out of it, and still moist and warm."
Well, if we're going to trade in literary fantasies, we can't forget Whitman:
ReplyDeleteTwenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass'd all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the....sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.