Sands Immense: A Fool’s Errand

Abstract

One November day in 1856, Herman Melville walked along Southport beach with his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his diary, Hawthorne records that they sat in a hollow in the sand dunes and had an important and difficult conversation. I know the Southport sand dunes well. Because of the continual shifting and reshaping of the topography, it would be impossible to make a pilgrimage to the spot where the two great men sat. But through the imagination it is possible to recreate the events of that day, and think about the way the environment affected them both. To Hawthorne, the dunescape was “dismal and monotonous”, the whole place “barren” and devoid of interest. But sand dunes offer shelter, privacy, a sense of wildness and isolation which make them an ideal environment for contemplation and the exchange of confidences. They are places of concealment and revelation.