Adoring Fans?

I started reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Blithedale Romance" several weeks ago. Then the library called and said that a book I had requested had come in, so I put the classic on the shelf and read a vampire slayer series instead. And really, the first two books were pretty good. The third one got a little out of hand. The fourth one was really quite vulgar. So, I googled the rest of them to get plot lines, just trying to see what was going to happen with the main character later on.

I will definitely not be reading the rest of the series.

It was time to pull "The Blithedale Romance" back out. I am only half way through, but I really don't have anything positive to say about the plot line. As far as I can tell, there really isn't one. The story itself is pretty boring.

But the quotes, and the references to other pieces of literature and bits of history are just amazing. I keep reading it not because of the story, but because of the vocabulary.

Andy simply shrugged his shoulders and grunted when I tried to explain that to him. I believe his exact quote was "Why don't you go talk to your adoring fans on your blog about it..." (in other words, he doesn't care, so stop pestering him about it!)

So, for lack of a better discussion group, you, my "adoring fans" get to be tortured with Nathaniel Hawthorne.

One of the characters, Hollingsworth, feels he has been called by God to a "mission" - details are not important. What is important is that he is very driven, very focused, very sure of his path. Hawthorne describes men like this...

"They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot... They have an idol, to which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious, and never once seem to suspect - so cunning has the Devil been with them - that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original object, the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process, by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism."

From what I have read of Hawthorne, I am not sure he really understood the saving grace of Jesus. But he seems to have hit that nail on the head, dead on.

I have seen "godlike benevolence debased into egotism", and it is not a pretty picture. No matter how much it begins with good, it never ends that way.

Just a small, or not so small, reminder that we can't do anything on our own.

So, my "adoring fans"... I am nothing. Please, don't expect anything from me. This blog, every line of code and paltry sentence, is just the spilling out of my heart. Hopefully it shows the overflow of HIM inside of me. But sometimes, it will just be me. Because I don't always overflow the right things.

Thanks for listening, and sharing in return. You have no idea how much I appreciate you!