[gowld]

"Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison."

Scarlet Letter was important among the limited works that could afford to be published. It touches on important idea. But it's stilted language of a different society isn't better than modern language. Just as we don't consider Nathaniel Hawthorne stupid because he wouldn't easily understand a modern sentence like "An open source platform for building a writing space on the web."

[romanows]

And just 19 years later, Mark Twain published The Innocents Abroad, which I remember loving. I haven't looked at either in decades, but I'd bet that I'd still find The Scarlett Letter to be ponderous and boring and The Innocents Abroad to be an absolute delight in its subject matter, storytelling, and playful use of language.

[bigstrat2003]

That isn't stilted, nor is it some crazy difficult usage of past English. If someone really can't understand it, then they really are ignorant.

[galdosdi]

Why do people like yourself have such an allergy to becoming familiar with the past? It is as small-minded to be parochially bound to your own time as it is to your own country. Think of it as analogous to learning Spanish or Chinese so you can understand people from those places.

Except it's much much easier because it's almost the same language, only a very, very, very slightly different dialect, that uses words that are still used, just a slightly different distribution of which are popular. Read a book or two from the 19th century and you'll find the rest easy.

When you admit that this is impenetrable to you you are admitting you've never tried for very long.

Not a single word in that sentence is uncommon today other than "edifice" (though any romance language speaker would understand it), as well as the fact that the average urbanite today does not know the names of many common weeds (but context makes that irrelevant)

Nathanial Hawthorne had no ability to converse with the future, but we have the ability, if we choose it, and a responsibility, to understand the past, so we can learn from it and make good choices in the future.