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YUVAL LEVIN: The story from its title on invites us first and foremost to think about Merry
Mount and the Merry Mounters. Who are these people, what is the May-Pole? Do we recognize
them? Amy, do you know who they are?
AMY KASS: Well yes, I do know who they are. I recognize them, they’re all around us.
They are people who live to eat, drink, and be merry. But these take this to an extreme.
They are like that all year long. So the Merry Mounters are described in the story as a wild
throng. We’re told, that an outsider looking at them would describe them as a “Crew of
Comus”, an ancient God who is related to Bacchus or in Greek Dionysus. The aim is to
look for utopia, or no place, or to uhh…merge oneself with the elements of things. And while
the Merry Mounters themselves will pursue happiness to an extreme, or, in each…in
any way that they choose, they are also a community. And the thing that binds them is
the May-Pole. The May-Pole is at the center of the community, and the May-Pole is an object
also of reverence for them.
YUVAL LEVIN: So the permanent May-Pole suggests a permanent festival. It’s a community always
in the midst of a permanent festival or a permanent spring. Is that any way to live?
Does Hawthorne suggest to us that this is in fact what it seems? That these people are
in fact living the life that utopians only imagined possible?
LEON KASS: I would modify Amy’s formulation of “eat, drink, and be merry” umm would
be uhh, well “eat drink, dance, and be merry, for tomorrow you will die.” And this rush
into the life of pleasure, and the celebration of umm…of the present moment, and the overcoming
of all of the boundaries and distinctions which in the end don’t really mean anything
anyhow, was I think a way…it was a kind of false joy covering over what is underlying
a deeper despair.
AMY KASS: Hawthorne makes that point very nicely by using the word “mirth” instead
of “happiness” or “joy”. Mirth and jollity.
YUVAL LEVIN: The story tells us, “Oh, people of the Golden Age, the chief of your husbandry,
was to raise flowers!” What- what do we take this to mean? Flowers as opposed to…food?
AMY KASS: Vegetables? I mean, flowers can go so far. But can it sustain over the years
without a settlement? Without settled ways? With this kind of monthly—if not daily—revelry?
It doesn’t sound like a sustainable community to me.
LEON KASS: I’m inclined to agree. I mean, some flowers go on to bear fruit. Umm, I mean,
to be interested in the flower and not in the seed and not in the fruit is another way
of saying one really just wants the bloom of things and nothing fruitful. And this is
not…the fruitfulness of flowering…is not on their minds. It’s the beauty of the present,
of the present moment. The problem, it seems to me, from the point of the community is
not only that they don’t plant and toil, but they really give no thought to the future.