nathaniel hawthorne. the scarlet letter. [invented worlds]

if you study literature there are seemingly hundreds and thousands of dramas, novels, short stories and poems that you're supposed to read. some of them are breathtakingly grand, some are unbelievably boring (or just a bit meh), some you love and some you can't stand. there are also those you don't even bother reading and you just hope your professor does not notice... the thing is, sometimes i get incredibly annoyed with a book by the mere fact that i am not reading it by choice but am forced to do so and it makes its way to some bookshelf (only some 10 pages of it read) to collect dust. the scarlet letter is one of those books that i probably should have read about three times for different seminars by now and i never got over page 25. however, i decided to really make an effort this time and just now i stumbled over a passage that reminds me why i love the written word, why i love literature with its invented worlds and why i am ultimately at the english seminar.

"The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which i would describe. It throws it unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and woman. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances. [...] At some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn to gold upon the page."

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.