"It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate"
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Hawthorne is selling a disciplined version of empathy: not the warm bath of being “seen,” but the bracing work of being decentered. The line’s engine is that phrase “go out of himself,” a moral demand disguised as social advice. Companionship isn’t framed as leisure or networking; it’s a regimen. You become healthier - “moral and intellectual” in one breath - by regularly colliding with people who don’t validate your obsessions and can’t be easily recruited into your self-story.
The subtext is quietly corrective, aimed at the comfortable provincialism of the educated man who mistakes refinement for virtue. Hawthorne doesn’t praise diversity as a virtue-signaling ornament; he insists on difference that resists you. “Care little for his pursuits” is the acid test. It’s easy to admire people who admire you. He’s arguing for relationships that deny you that mirror, forcing you to practice interpretation rather than performance.
Context matters: Hawthorne wrote in an America thick with reform movements, moral certainties, and tight-knit communities that could turn into echo chambers long before the term existed. His own work circles the psychological costs of purity and the social theater of righteousness. Here, he proposes an antidote: cultivate proximity to other “spheres,” not to collect them, but to strain your imagination until it can hold someone else’s inner life. The sentence is long, patient, slightly admonishing - like the habit he recommends.
The subtext is quietly corrective, aimed at the comfortable provincialism of the educated man who mistakes refinement for virtue. Hawthorne doesn’t praise diversity as a virtue-signaling ornament; he insists on difference that resists you. “Care little for his pursuits” is the acid test. It’s easy to admire people who admire you. He’s arguing for relationships that deny you that mirror, forcing you to practice interpretation rather than performance.
Context matters: Hawthorne wrote in an America thick with reform movements, moral certainties, and tight-knit communities that could turn into echo chambers long before the term existed. His own work circles the psychological costs of purity and the social theater of righteousness. Here, he proposes an antidote: cultivate proximity to other “spheres,” not to collect them, but to strain your imagination until it can hold someone else’s inner life. The sentence is long, patient, slightly admonishing - like the habit he recommends.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
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