The Custom House & Chapter 1

"It is a good lesson--though it may be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves and all he aims at."

Wow. How true is this? What do our personal goals really mean to the world? The answer: Nothing. Each of our dreams, goals, loves, and hopes are but another flake of snow upon this earth. Some shall last forever, some only seconds. Some hopes will be recycled, thawed by spring's warming life, enabling it to quench the thirst of moral fiber; while others vanish, or sometimes, will become polluted by all the impurities of humanity and its sinful ways of nature. Goals and aspirations are unique for each individual, yet sometimes the basics of an aspiration allow for the grouping of separate people into the 'clicks' of clubs and teams and circles striving toward their common factor. Yet how meaningless such goals are outside these clicks, out in the real world--which some argue doesn't exist, that the world is simple what someone makes of it--that forages on the meat of raw ambition and hopeless hope.

It is ironic that Hawthorne writes that this lesson is a "hard one." Is this not so with many of life's most important lessons? Friendship, love, life, death; all of these are harsh lessons at times that abuse the learner, forcing that person to stare directly into the eye of difficulty and defeat knowing not what will become of them, only that there is a lesson to be learned. The most thorough lessons in life are the ones that collapse the ground from underneath the foot. At these times it is a decision to stand again on a lower pedestal or to slide apathetically into the lifeless home of darkness.

The narrator of The Custom House is looking for fame. However, fame is like control, an allusion of the senses, a shadow that is held for only a second before eluding the eternal grasp of its demise. Fame is a mindset, and how happy everyone would be is they all could simply be famous to themselves.