Thanksgiving offers the chance to escape from the tedium of the everyday, and to reorient toward a happy and healthy attitude of gratitude.
Holidays always offer the chance to escape from the everyday. Some holidays offer an escape from the painful and miserable.
During the American Civil War, Nathaniel Hawthorne escaped to Italy.
He had written his great novels many years before: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, which never made enough money for him to devote himself entirely to writing.
And now, he was too old and too melancholic and too sensitive to endure the devastation and terror of war.
He was always trying to escape.
In the Blithedale Romance, he writes of his escape to Brook Farm, a failed socialist utopia.
And in The House of Seven Gables, he writes of his failed escape from the burden of his family’s involvement with the witchcraft trials and executions.
In Italy, it was easy for Hawthorne to escape yet again.
And while there, he wrote his last novel, The Marble Faun, one of the most original novels ever written.
It’s original not only because of its half human character, and not only because of its climax near the beginning, but because it combines two widely different genres: a fantastical story and a realistic travel guide.
Yes, a travel guide like those provided by Lonely Planet or Frommer or Rick Steves.
Many of the early buyers of the Marble Faun bought it for the pictures of the famous tour sites in Italy, the reader moving from site to site while moving through the story.
It was an escape for even his most uncomprehending readers.
In its context, The Marble Faun is about the escape from the American Civil War. It’s a gift to his American readers who lacked the funds to escape to Italy. It’s an American book about a world that is nothing like the devastated and charred fields, strewn with bodies. It’s Escapist Literature in Capital Letters for a population wearied and bloodied… its young men merely disposable bodies of no worth except to charge into a pit.
We read for many reasons, and “escape” is often derided as a bad reason to read. But when a reader escapes into an imaginary world of great beauty and adventure, this can be one of the most precious experiences in our very real lives.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, available at Amazon.
