Hawthorne--like Poe--became a kind of virtuoso in the fiction of the inner life: the only novelist from New England as subtle as E...merson and Dickinson. He was able to present in the current style the extraordinary burden on the New England mind of the past, its moral introspection, its unending self-confrontation. Poe, his only equal in the "tale," was really a convert to aesthetic medievalism, an apologist for slavery, order, and hierarchy, a writer of "grotesques and arabesques" who saw the power of blackness as personal damnation and a way of practicing literary terror. It is the force of the repressed that Poe made his drawing card, the power not of the past but of the dead, as phantoms preying on unsleeping guilt. Hawthorne remained a child of Puritanism, rooted in the village, the theocracy, the rule of law, the numbing force of convention. Poe, by contrast, is forever homeless, landless, seeking a visionary home in some Platonic heaven of eternal Beauty, writing his most poignant poems out of a profound homesickness that operated as a curse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When hot dogs like Mr. D'Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it's because t...hey're suffering from a disease. It's called bull-imia, and it's the regurgitation of patent hyperbole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no call for indignation or resentment at anyone whatsoever inquiring, holding, or propounding views concerning the d...ivine, for it is not the authority of the disputant, but the truth of the disputation that is in the request.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You punish crimes committed, with us the thought of crime is a sin; you fear the voice of witness, we the sole voice of conscience....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As on the highroad he who walks lightest walks with most ease, so on the journey of life more happiness comes from lightening... the needs by poverty than from panting under a burden of wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The body in the grave is like the tree in winter; they conceal their greenness under a show of dryness.... We too must wait for th...e springtime of the body.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
God cannot be seen: he is too bright for sight; nor grasped: he is too pure for touch; nor measured: for he is beyond all sense, i...nfinite, measureless, his dimension known to himself alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »