Featuring commentary from Megan Marshall and John Kaag
Hester Prynne never leaves Boston. Henry David Thoreau never really leaves Concord. Both of them, in their own books, become a law unto themselves without going anywhere at all, and the difference in how they manage it says something about what nonconformity actually costs.
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John Kaag's Thoreau lifts Kant's definition of genius and gives it to a Concord woodchopper. Paul Guyer's Kant has one condition Thoreau refuses: be understood.
Go deeper →Paul Guyer's Kant lets you hire a man if you pay him fairly. Garth Greenwell's Adam Verver pays the Prince perfectly and still does him a profound wrong.
Go deeper →Margaret Atwood watches a revolution devour its makers in real time. Megan Marshall watches one win, settle, and build a prison and a graveyard first.
Go deeper →Sadie Stein weeps at Mr. Bennet's half-sentence goodbye. Garth Greenwell reads a whole novel about a father who can't say it, so the daughter must.
Go deeper →Boston sewed Hester's A in cloth; New York pinned Ellen's D in whispers. Marshall and Gay show which mark a woman can work, and it isn't the polite one.
Go deeper →Maggie Verver and May Welland are the real intelligences of their novels. Greenwell and Gay part on what each does with knowledge: reconstruction or control.
Go deeper →To live deliberately is to pay attention, Kaag argues — mindfulness of passing experience and honest self-reflection. No wilderness required.
Go deeper →Thoreau went to Walden in 1845 to test which necessities are real and to find out, before dying, whether he had lived — a question Kaag says still travels.
Go deeper →Voltaire and Marcus Aurelius attack the same enemy: the optimism that turns your suffering into proof of your own inadequacy.
Go deeper →The A never holds still: adulteress at the scaffold, able and armor at the cottage, awe by the end — Marshall tracks a symbol its makers couldn't control.
Go deeper →Madame Defarge's knitting is ressentiment made visible, Atwood and Martin show — legitimate rage metastasized into a register that cannot stop expanding.
Go deeper →Zarathustra's missing way and Thoreau's different drummer are the same demand, Martin and Kaag show: there is no ready-made path — only the one you make.
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