The Dead

Shall we never, never get rid of this past? It lies upon the present like a giant’s dead body!

Just think a moment, and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to bygone times—to Death, if we give the matter the right word!
 

We read in dead men’s books! We laugh at dead men’s jokes and cry at dead men’s pathos! We are sick of dead men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity according to dead men’s forms and creeds. Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man’s icy hand obstructs us!

And we must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere.

(Hawthorne 127)