The world is ever-shrinking daily, and those who follow their dreams or their fortunes are perpetually impelled into new circumstances and new places by the pursuit. In fact, many of us have only heard faintly-whispered tales of a time when place defined an individual, when surnames signified the particular dust in which a family located its roots, when an ancient stranger might stop you in the street at recognizing, from the blur of his own distant childhood, an aspect in your eyes so similar to your great-great-grandfather, who was, then, as ancient as this stranger is now. When place mattered, before it was available through mail-order catalogs or on-line, the staggered overlapping of generations living contemporarily in one place kept the ghosts of ancestors far more present and alive than they can be today. The gravity of ancestry weighed a man down, anchored him in the dust of family, and buried his fate in the sins and triumphs of his line.

We live now in a world of individuals, where even the nuclear family, a solitary outpost on the frontier of now-forgotten lineage, has largely declined into an anachronistic relic as emotionally potent, yet as irrelevant to our modern sense of self, as the American frontier. In the transition, we have gained what by some might be called freedom: an autonomy over our lives and destinies, as individuals free from the burdens and silent expectations of the past. We feel absolutely free to move from place to place, seeking work, or love, or communities and landscapes conducive to our ideal internal dispositions. We no longer consider ourselves to be defined by place; instead, we move from place to place, borrowing a bit of our identities from the ambient energy in the air, while lending a bit of the same to the place until we, or our progeny, inevitably migrate elsewhere. In this way we unshackle ourselves from the past, like a freed Prometheus, as we ease our sore bellies from the pains caused by so many vultures, the ghosts of our ancestors. Yet in severing our longevity from the permanence of place, we ensure that our presence on the Earth is absolutely ephemeral; within a few generations even tattered photographs and letters signify nothing about the identities of the selves represented and contained therein.

Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in a smaller, more intimate America, one with a barely nascent past. At the outset America was solely populated, except for the natives, by immigrants seeking to reinvent themselves, to unshackle themselves from their pasts, much as we do now. The nature of this new land, a limitless haven for European rejects and misfits previously unsatisfied by their allotted place, could have nourished the growth of a previously unheard of individualism ("O my America, my new found land / My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned," says Donne in another context). The vast numbers of transplanted individuals who wiped the dust of their ancestry on some European doormat, along with the limitless possibilities to be found on this seemingly limitless continent, promised much for those who sought to define themselves without reference to history. But the inertia of human nature is difficult to overcome, and Hawthorne found himself in New England, politically different from the Old, but full of the same impediments, as he saw them, to individuality and freedom of identity. The society created by these refugees was too similar to what they left behind, too weighted down by customs that had hitched a ride across the Atlantic like ticks on livestock. The individual was still suffocating under the weight of custom.

The Scarlet Letter overflows with a metaphorical exploration of this theme. Hester in the end redeems herself without reference to external morality, calling attention both to the overwrought artifice of colonial Calvinism and to the hypocrisy of those who are unable or unwilling to differentiate between custom and morality. Pearl, even as a child, defines herself solely by her own will and the context of her conception, rather than by culture or heritage. Despite her mother's decision to remain in Boston, she finally escapes the life that the surrounding society would inflict on her in retribution for her mother's perceived sin; she seeks out a new place in which to define herself, again without reference to arbitrary external morality, while still showing reverence for her origins in the manner that she chooses. Yet The Scarlet Letter is a complex work, and Hawthorne intertwines countless other themes with this one. Further, the evolving and self-referential metaphors throughout the novel threaten to confound any attempt to decipher them. The Custom House, on the other hand, offers a concise, unified exploration of the role of place in self-identity, and Hawthorne's unique use of metaphor will in the end reveal much about his vision for the potential of the unfettered individual.

We begin with Hawthorne's description of his place, which deserves to be quoted at length:

This old town of Salem—my native place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years—possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame—its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other—such being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checkerboard. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a city. And here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthy substance with the soil; until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know.

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor… a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. To Hawthorne, place is more than simply location and infrastructure; it is saturated with meaning that percolates up from the imagination and soaks into the dust and air and weathered wood. Memory, sentiment, and affection are responsible for this meaning. But these things originate in the mind; thus, in the most literal sense, meaning is imposed by the observer on his surroundings. From this point of view, Hawthorne's metaphors are merely semantic: place is merely physical, the dead are merely dead, and the mechanisms of the mind fill in the gaps, inventing meaning where there is none. But Hawthorne's language suggests that the converse is true as well: surroundings impose meaning on the observer. Being human in the world means that we are all affected in this way. Place is a force. History, ancestry, and memory are active agents who conspire to envelop the individual in their mysterious manipulations of meaning, but this can only take place when generations of human lives become intertwined with their place in the world. The conspiracy of meaning takes generations to develop, but the weight of a single lifetime's memories can be carried away by the first sweet breeze of spring. The ghosts of nomads have no substance, but the ghosts of successive generations of a people, inhabiting the same piece of earth, walking the same streets, come in time to saturate that place, intermingling with it, until human lives and place become an intractable melange of meaning, meaning which over time acquires almost tangible form and substance. "This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct."

These are the roots of culture, not American culture or Southwestern culture, but the microcosm of culture with which we are little familiar anymore. In the more intimate America of Hawthorne's world, where towns were eddies of humanity in a sea of unimproved real estate, such microcosms of culture could develop free from external influence. To a certain extent, this is a beautiful phenomenon. Culture constitutes the identity of a people by lending strength and substance to the ties of community, and there is nothing inherently stifling about a community so formed. But this was young America, to which the miscreant sons of Europe had fled in order to plant the cornerstone of their new cultural edifice in purposeful design, to allow the accumulated sediment of their collective past to be carried away by the first breeze of spring. Hawthorne saw in this the potential for the individual to reinvent himself, thereby reinventing his society and shedding the accumulated moral habits for which no citizen could any longer give an account. In the same glance, though, Hawthorne saw human inertia beginning to weigh down these microcosms of culture, so ripe for unprecedented growth.

I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and cast of character which had all along been familiar here—ever, as one representative of the race lay down in his grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main street—might still in my little day be seen and recognized in the old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connection, which has become an unhealthy one, should at last be severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted for too long a series of generations in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

Custom is born from human inertia. In the Old World, the endless regression of history into the murky past makes it impossible to determine the origins of morality. But in Hawthorne's young America, a place defined by its potential for the individual to actively and consciously reinvent his society, morality can be reinvented as well, dependent only on the individual's access to truth. This is not the introduction of moral relativism; instead, Hawthorne's reference in The Custom House to his time spent with Emerson suggests that he mirrors the views of the latter: ". . . to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius." But the force of custom is opposed to this. Morality which springs from the individual is rightly characterized as fresh, new growth (the wild rose growing outside Hester Prynne's prison door, for example). In contrast, custom, which merely masquerades as true morality, simply accumulates over time like dust in a culture, and no individual can give an account of its origins (where does dust come from?) or of its rationale in deciding right from wrong (what access does dust have to truth?). Custom is thus arbitrary, irrational, and foundationless, and the individual is the seed of real morality.

Custom is also tied to place. In an America filled with small, distinct microcosms of culture, the customs of any particular place develop in a near vacuum. These various customs may not diverge to any great extent from their common origins within a single lifetime, but over time, the weight of accumulated custom can be staggering, and the divergence from its origins can be remarkable. The evolution of language, for example, follows a similar pattern: French, Italian, and Spanish differ far less from Latin than they do from each other, because each evolved in relative isolation from the rest, and diverged in a unique way from its source. Yet, because the evolution of language does not happen according to a rational principle, to say that Italian is more moral than French is nonsense. Instead, we find that language, like custom, evolves arbitrarily. But, as Hawthorne points out, custom has weight, which accumulates as it evolves. In the end, it can come to smother the place that fostered its growth in the beginning.

For Hawthorne, all these things that accumulate in human society without a corresponding rational principle are one. Custom can only accumulate in a place, and the ad hoc assortment of ancestral tenants of that place, so intermingled with its physical aspect, heap layer upon layer of sediment on the new growth. History also becomes tangible, acquires substance, and swallows individual human lives in its grand, unstoppable march toward future oblivion. But to distill cause from effect of this accumulation, to isolate place from history from custom, is to render injustice to Hawthorne. All these things are interchangeable to him; the relationship is ecological. That is, if we seek to understand linearly, or mathematically, what he so effectively communicates metaphorically, we must understand these relationships in terms of thresholds and equilibria rather than in terms of cause and effect. For his purpose is not to diagnose or to dissect, but to describe and to implore. The unified tone of The Custom House immerses us in his melancholy sense of decaying history, of dust and ghosts, of an aborted Golden Age of fetal individualism lurking just behind the earliest memories of the oldest fossils still walking the streets of Salem or haunting the upper floors of the Custom House proper. (Attention educator: If you are reading this as fulfillment of an academic assignment, you should know that it was lifted straight from the internet.)

We can see most clearly the mechanisms of Hawthorne's use of metaphor in the application of the same adjective, for example, to people and to architecture. Hawthorne again describes his ancestors:

Planted deep in the town's earliest infancy and childhood by these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here; always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy member! but seldom or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations, performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public notice. Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight; as old houses here and there about the streets, get covered halfway to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil.

To cite the myriad examples of this technique would soon grow tedious; it suffices to say that The Custom House overflows with metaphors and adjectives which highlight the various ways in which this substance—call it history, place, or custom—accumulates and smothers the individual. The streets of Salem are described in the same terms as the interior of the Custom House, in the same terms as the "venerable figures, sitting in old fashioned chairs" who work there and the "gray shadows" of Hawthorne's forefathers. Similarly, the Inspector of the Custom House: "The heat that had formerly pervaded his nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never of the kind that flashes and flickers in a blaze; but, rather, a deep, red glow, as of iron in a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness; thus was the expression his repose, even in such decay as had crept untimely over him." Due to a fortunate coincidence in the arbitrary evolution of language, the Custom House itself is aptly named. It is rightly called an edifice, built up layer by layer from the accumulated past: ". . . cobwebbed and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with gray sand in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse."

Yet despite these burdens weighing down the individual, Hawthorne cannot help but look on them all with "affection." For place, ancestry, and custom do, in fact, contribute undeniably to the definition the individual, and it is only by virtue of these forces that we have any notion at all of 'home'. This accounts for Hawthorne's melancholy sentiment. The individual who seeks to invent himself without reference to history is necessarily orphaned, and since the endeavor requires extracting oneself from under the weight of place and history, he is cast out to wander in solitude. Hawthorne himself found it impossible to permanently escape his own place; he put his only hope for escaping the relentless tide of human history in his progeny. "My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth." Thus, the potential is seemingly limitless for the individual to determine true morality, broadcasting it into the world from the hidden depths of his interior. But in fulfilling this potential, he necessarily alienates himself from an essential aspect of his human nature, an aspect which in truth may be more basic and primal than the moral potential. Witness the ancient citizens of the Custom House who recline, the energy of youth long faded, in their sensual memories of feasts and fireplaces far more than in their days of individual glory. Home, more than anything else, is what makes us happy in the end; if we cannot ignore the appeal of its sensual comforts, we must rely on our offspring, or on their offspring, to realize the limitless moral potential of the unfettered individual. The problem, of course, is that home will be as appealing to them as it is to us.

As long as home exists, that is, as long as place holds primacy in our hearts, we will live lives divided along this line in our nature. This is not to imply that home is merely an impediment to the realization of the individual's potential. It is true that the melancholy eddy of home, continually drawing us back toward the center, contradicts the tendency of our rational nature to expand outward by virtue of the force of moral autonomy. But the lone modern individual, an ephemeral tenant in the world, a tumbleweed of moral potential, is not fully human without roots. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to find equilibrium, to acknowledge the past without allowing it to bury us under its immense weight. In time, perhaps, we will find roots in the depths of our own unique moral potential that are not merely sensually appealing, like those of home. Perhaps the individual will prove to be infinite in a way that the past and the future cannot be. Such a hope propels this individual forward into the unknown.