In a Moment of Calm

One of the most pleasant sensations I can think of is that of absent-mindedly, unintentionally recalling something, which you did not really expect to remember or reconsider, but pops up repeatedly whenever your mind is at ease and open to intrusion. I've been feeling that way about an essay by Elisa New, on Hawthorne, that I read in the New Republic in August, especially this line at the end:

Wherever he roamed, Hawthorne's dwelling place was New England, but his art was never so parochial a place. It occupies, instead, the liminal and highly charged zone where the psyche, cast off from its lonely foundations, risks true growth.

I don't even have anything to say about this now; no reaction I can put into words at all. It has to do also with the schoolwork I have been doing lately, especially on a set of ancient Chinese poems about lovesick shamans and retiring divinities. Unfortunately I can hardly express an ounce of what I feel altogether, and I don't know when I will be able to make something out of this feeling now.