Passages from the American Notebooks, Volume 2. — Reading Notes

Brook Farm as a Polar Paradise

Hawthorne's first entries from Brook Farm, dated April 1841, immediately undercut any pastoral ideal. He calls the place a 'polar Paradise' and jokes about needing a polar bear's skin for summer dress. The humor is dry, self-deprecating, and rooted in physical discomfort: he breaks farm tools, fears the cows' horns, and describes himself as an 'unregenerated man' shivering within. The catalog subject 'New England -- Social life and customs' might suggest a broad ethnographic record, but Hawthorne's focus is narrow and personal. He notes the 'transcendental heifer' belonging to Margaret Fuller—a detail that says more about his amusement at philosophical pretensions than about communal farming. His observations are sharpest when he is uncomfortable, and the entries read less as a chronicle of utopian experiment than as a series of comic misadventures.

The River Breaks Its Fetters

A lengthy entry from April 14, 1841, describes the ice breaking on a river near Brook Farm. Hawthorne's prose becomes almost cinematic: ice masses act like a 'battering-ram,' trees 'quiver like a reed,' and the water encroaches 'several yards on the boundaries of our orchard.' The passage is notable for its sustained attention to a single natural event, yet it is interrupted by the supper-bell—a reminder that this is a working diary, not a literary set piece. The catalog subject 'New England -- Intellectual life -- 19th century' might lead a reader to expect philosophical musings, but Hawthorne's mind here is on the physical world: the 'sluggish river-god,' the 'tufts of bushes emerging' to breathe. The observation is precise, almost scientific, but framed by the mundane rhythm of farm life.

Reading and Writing Amid Manure

Hawthorne's notebook entries blend intellectual labor with manual work in a way that defies the catalog's separation of 'Intellectual life' from 'Social life and customs.' He writes of attacking a manure heap with a pitchfork, then retreats to his study to read the Dial and Margaret Fuller's article on Canova. The transition is abrupt, unremarked. He catches an idea 'by the skirts' but cannot yet put it on paper. The entries show a writer struggling to balance physical exhaustion with creative ambition, and the result is a fragmented record of a life in which literature and farm chores coexist uneasily. The catalog subjects imply distinct domains, but Hawthorne's notebooks reveal their entanglement.

Readers approaching this volume as a straightforward source on New England social customs or Hawthorne's intellectual milieu will find instead a diary of the body: bruises, broken tools, leaky boats, and the constant interruption of meals and chores. The value of these notebooks lies not in their completeness but in their raw, unpolished immediacy. Hawthorne's eye for the specific—the exact shade of a bruise, the sound of ice breaking—makes even the most mundane entry a window into a writer's daily negotiation with the world.

Years shelving Hawthorne’s notebooks, I often pause at his quiet, honest jottings—the way he recorded a stranger’s face or a passing mood, never quite the catalog’s tidy subject. There’s a similar, unhurried intimacy in The pearl of days — A Closer Reading, which seems to whisper back, patient as an old friend, that private margins hold their own soft truth.