The Village Uncle (from "twice Told Tales")
1837
The Village Uncle (from "twice Told Tales")
1837
An old fisherman sits by the hearth on Thanksgiving night, his children and grandchildren gathered around him, and lets his mind drift backward across the decades. Hawthorne here is not the dark allegorist of 'Young Goodman Brown' but something rarer: a writer undone by the simple passage of time. He remembers his wife Susan, long dead, and the particular quality of light on the New England coast. He recalls the sea's moods, the village's characters, the small happinesses that accumulated into a life. Yet the warmth around him carries its own weight: each embrace from his grandchildren is shadowed by the knowledge that he has perhaps one more Thanksgiving, maybe two, before joining the ancestors. Hawthorne refuses to let nostalgia go unexamined. The old man experiences joy and grief simultaneously, each memory carrying its own ghost. It's a portrait of late-life consciousness that feels almost modern in its tender ambivalence, and it asks the question every reader eventually faces: what do we carry forward, and what carries us?
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“Pleasant is a rainy winter's day, within doors! The best study for such a day, or the best amusement,”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Thus from beneath the black veil there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Perhaps a germ of love was springing in their hearts so pure that it might blossom in Paradise, since it could not be matured on earth;””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“I know what to think when a young girl shivers by a warm hearth and complains of lonesomeness at her mother's side. Shall I put these feelings into words?””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world; it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love and kept him in that saddest of all prisons his own heart;””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“I wonder he is not afraid to be alone with himself." "Men sometimes are so," said her husband.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The subject had reference to secret sin and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister as his black veil to them.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Village Uncle (from "twice Told Tales"). Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-village-uncle-from-twice-told-tales-5d603747-8b51-492f-9552-86ffe8c78a67.Hawthorne, N. (1837). The Village Uncle (from "twice Told Tales"). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-village-uncle-from-twice-told-tales-5d603747-8b51-492f-9552-86ffe8c78a67Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Village Uncle (from "twice Told Tales"). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-village-uncle-from-twice-told-tales-5d603747-8b51-492f-9552-86ffe8c78a67.
