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Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850
Boston, the 1640s. Hester Prynne came over from England ahead of her husband, an older scholar who never arrived, and in his absence she had a baby.
The town stood her on a scaffold and sewed her sentence onto her dress: a scarlet letter A, worn on the breast, for the rest of her life. She would not say who the father was.
He was the young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, the most beloved preacher in the colony. He has said nothing for seven years, and the silence is hollowing him out.
Hester has spent those seven years at the edge of town, sewing for the people who shunned her and raising her daughter, Pearl. She has become so steady that some neighbors now say the A stands for Able.
Then, in the forest, she and the minister finally meet alone. She tells him they can leave and cross the sea, and to prove she means it she unclasps the letter and throws it into the dead leaves by a brook.
This is what happens next.
“By another impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair; and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features. There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves, with her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour.”
Look at three words. What men call.
He did not write "the irrevocable past." He wrote what men call the irrevocable past, and in three words he took the whole verdict and handed it back to the people who issued it.
Now listen to me. Her youth did not return because she got younger.
She is seven years older, poorer, and still at the edge of the same town with the same child. It came back because it had never actually gone.
It was under a cap.
She did not have to earn her beauty back, or be forgiven for it. She had to take something off.
Watch her face while it happens. The smile arrives, and color comes into a cheek that had been long so pale.
We are told the opposite every day of our lives. That a woman's richness is a season, that it closes, and that after a certain point the sensible thing is to wear the plain cap and be Able.
I have been Able. So have you, and I would bet the notebook on it.
Do not skim the last clause. With her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown.
Not the old happiness, restored. A new one she never had even when she was young and allowed.
The past does not come back to sit exactly where it sat. It comes back carrying something.
And look how long it takes. The magic circle is not a lifetime. It is one hour beside a brook.
This book is free. Most of us remember a red letter from a film or a school hallway and never read the page where she takes it off.
Whatever you pinned up, you pinned up. Which means it comes down.
Underneath it I wrote
Mine is not irrecoverable. It is only pinned up.
Today. Copy the last sentence of the passage by hand, all of it, slowly, including the three words. Then write one line underneath about something you put away because you were told its time was over. Not where it went. Only that it is still there.
What I wrote that year
In March of the year I could not write, I copied a sentence of Cranford onto the back of an envelope. The notebook was in another room and I did not want to lose the sentence on the walk.
Underneath it, very small, I put three words. "Wait for me."
I did not know who I was asking. I think now it was my own hand.
