While reading Hawthorne's short stories, I noticed a deep tension between knowledge and beauty, as if they are two antithetical principles that automatically cancel eachother and cannot coexist. In my opinion, Hawthorne identifies beauty with a heightened kind of knowledge that opposes the earthly one: it is the latent and chaotical knowledge of the unmanifest, a sacred knowledge that reflects the fragile balance of the universe and one which cannot be grasped by the "scientific" mind.
Today I've learned the most important lesson of all. The beauty of silence lies in the fact that it's close to nothingness. It represents all the ideas and no idea in particular. It's a complete feeling and at the same time, sentimental numbness....