Shabbat Reading: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

#whatireadovershabbat Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850; Oxford UP, 1998)

Every time you reread a book, you see another aspect of it. It’s not only that you recognize foreshadowing you couldn’t before, or notice details that didn’t catch your eye the first or second time. As you get older, you connect to different characters, resonate with insights that require you to have gone through life’s stages, having loved and lost, or become a parent, or got fired, or rekindled an old friendship. A classic is a book that grows with you, able to be reread at any age.

I’m hardly the first to make these observations. However, I have heard much less about another age-related reading phenomenon. Namely, books that you can’t read until a certain age.

Of course, there are the obvious restrictions: vocabulary, frame of reference, appropriateness of content. A tot could babble the words of Absalom, Absalom! but he wouldn’t understand them. A tween could read Phenomenology of Spirit, technically; her comprehension would at best be fitful.

No, I mean that you understand the meaning of each sentence, you are cognizant of the context of the book, and you aren’t being exposed to inappropriate, repellent subject matter. And yet still, somehow, you can’t understand it. The real meaning eludes you and, even worse, you may have the impression that you’ve got a real profound insight into it.

I remember being assigned Richard Wilbur’s “The Death of a Toad” in early high school and writing an essay about the lines that describe the titular demise:

       He lies
As if he would return to stone,
And soundlessly attending, dies
Toward some deep monotone,

Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies.

Cruelly misinterpreting these lines, I latched onto the word “emperies” to suggest that the frog was some kind of dictator back in its native habitat! A worse misreading of Wilbur’s tender poem, while understanding the basic sense, I can’t imagine. It was simply beyond me for some reason, at fourteen, to access the depth of feeling that might overcome a suburban homeowner to watch an animal he has accidentally maimed drag itself off to die in a corner of the backyard. I couldn’t see what the poem was about.

This is all a meandering lead-in to the feeling I had on reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850): gratitude that I hadn’t been assigned this classroom classic in high school. You have to lived some life to understand the book...

To read the rest, head to my Substack, Well-Read (or Trying)