![]() ![]() And in this case, it actually probably could. A secret couldn’t actually do that to someone, could it? I remember how struck I was when I finally understood the story behind the letter – and how shocked at the incredibly physical toll that keeping it secret took on the fair Reverend Dimmesdale. I didn’t.īut despite everything, The Scarlet Letter gets one thing so incredibly right that it almost-almost-makes up for everything it gets wrong: it’s not healthy to keep a secret. And it’s not that I changed my mind about the writing-actually, having reread parts now to write this column, I’m surprised that I managed to finish at all (sincere apologies to all Hawthorne fans). After trying my hand at Seven Gables-I just couldn’t stay away, could I I think it was forcibly foisted on all Massachusetts school children, since the house in question was only a short field trip away-I couldn’t. And it’s not that I began to judge Hawthorne less harshly. It’s not that the book became a favorite. Luckily for me, what I found sitting on my desk in tenth grade was not my sister’s old nemesis but The Scarlet Letter. ![]() With trepidation bordering on the kind of dread I’d only ever felt when staring down a snake that I had mistaken for a tree branch, I flipped open the cover. But it was something about him that just didn’t sit right. I read War and Peace cover to cover long before Hawthorne crossed my path and finished A Tale of Two Cities (in that same high school classroom) in no time flat. Now, I’ve never been one to judge books by size. And I had a near panic attack when I, now in high school myself, was handed my own first copy of the dreaded Mr. I felt my anxiety mount when she declared the same hefty tome unreadable and said she would rather fail the test than finish the slog. I first dreaded him when my older sister came home with a miserable face and a 100-pound version of The House of the Seven Gables. I never much cared for Nathaniel Hawthorne. And the secreter the secret, the worse the backlash on your psyche will likely be. Resist it, and you may find yourself in worse shape than you’d bargained for. Just like the two Rhesus Macaques in the picture above, we have an urge to spill the beans when we know we shouldn’t-and that urge is a remarkably healthy one. As in, really, really bad at it (no matter what anyone may tell you to the contrary). ![]()
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