Finding Hope, When Needed Most, In Fiction

Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Steinbeck, Campbell, Ricketts, Capote, Carson, Lee, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Melville, Twain, Frost, and more

Dear friend,

Summer's swelter continues. The air is hot and heavy and not easy to breathe, and we are not even one-third of the way through the season. Equally distressing are current events. Not long ago, I read a piece that claimed, "America, we love you. But it’s hard." I was already feeling a kinship with that sentiment, but after Saturday's horrifying assassination attempt and the wake of toxic rhetoric—all of it conspires to smother me more than our harsh climate.

In need of hope, my response was to retreat to quietude, to peace, to this simple monastic life with two silent but thoughtful and curious souls for company. I've slid deeper into summer fiction and poetry and fine essays penned by the masters of all things enlightening.

Concord’s Colonial Inn, where we stayed for a night, and Thoreau once lived.

My imagination takes over, and I play a game with myself where I'm walking, as of late, in Concord, Massachusetts. It’s in the time of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott and her sisters. It feels possible because of December's stop, the first of our trip to visit literary haunting grounds and graves of America's finest scribes.

Samwise, Emily, and I were up at 3:00 am and walking outside of the door of the inn where Thoreau once lived soon after on the cold, crisp, starry night. The various homes of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott still stand. At that hour, without the busyness of Mercedes, Range Rovers, Volvos, and BMWs filing nonstop through the old-fashioned and now ridiculously affluent town, it was easy to believe we were back in the 1850s. In my fertile imagination, Henry bent over to scratch Samwise's head and invited us to visit him at his cabin on Walden Pond. Waldo greeted us, and we spoke of the weather as he mopped his brow with a handkerchief. Nathaniel was his typical gloomy self, so I did not ask him if it was true that Herman Melville had fallen in love with him when they met in the Berkshires. Louisa May stopped to play with Emily and spoke warmly of how much she admired the adventurous nature of her sister, May, who was throwing herself into art.

Henry at Walden Woods.

In the hours when people sleep, ghosts roam freely, and I find that I can place myself in any era I wish. I do this often during our travels, and not just in historically rich places like Concord. Sometimes, in National Parks, we can have the entire South Rim of the Grand Canyon to ourselves—with the occasional passing elk herd or a pair of mountain lions. The landscape is timeless on these secluded, meandering adventures.

I find the off-hours to be mysteriously enchanting, bewitching, and intoxicating. In their stillness, all things are possible.