Rob S. Friedman

August 2021

Hawthorne and Melville

I have tried what seems a lifetime to understand the two of you. Brooding silently and alone like a barn owl, Nathaniel, while Herman rages, Lear-like, only to regain his own assuredness once again, briefly, and once again. Like brothers bleeding truths differently, you clasped hands. How I wished I was in the dells below Mt. Greylock with you to see the genius break through, not lost amid the sunlight piercing meadow grass that so pained your eyes in the morning. The two of you, elbows joined in sharp admiration and wonder, matched by your shared agony born of sublime recognition that you’d dismiss at summer’s end even though it refused to quit you. I didn’t know, at sixteen, driving to my own carnal initiation in a Berkshires cabin atop Mt. Greylock, that so many years later I’d be in your thrall, returning to it evermore, and not to hers, though we’d groped and fumbled our way to whatever I’d hoped would last, a different transcendence I’d recognize as sublime in a different way.

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