Morning Read: Necedades y Mentiras
¶ What bogs down Moby-Dick for me — and what made it so popular seventy-odd years ago, I expect — is the fearlessness with which Melville wades into metaphysical speculation. No vicarage teas here! Just manly abstractions — which I, unfortunately, find altogether gaseous. I had to read the following four times just to see what mighty point Melville was laboring to make.
For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnabulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
The renown of this charmless book surprises me — unless, as is often the case among self-consciously “serious†men, that charmlessness is the charm.
¶ In Don Quixote, more “literary criticism.†The innkeeper declares himself a fan of knightly romances, and manages to preserve Don Cirongilio of Thrace and the wonderfully-named Felixmarte of Hyrcania from the pyromaniacal priest and barber. Warned that he risks succumbing to Quixote’s disordered fever-dreams of chivalry, the innkeeper demurs, “I wouldn’t be crazy enough to become a knight errant; I see very well that thse days are different from the old days, when they say those famous knights wandered through the world.†Of course, this statement is posed so that Sancho can overhear it and be troubled.
Sancho had returned in the middle of this conversation and was left very confused and bewildered when he heard that nowadays there were no more knights errant and that all the books of chivalry were foolish lies, and he resolved in his heart to wait and see the outcome of the journey his master was about to take; if it did not turn out as well as he hoped, he was determined to leave and go back to his wife and his children and his customary work.
¶ In Squillions, Coward rolls up his sleeves for wartime work. He is enrolled on the infamous list of “agents†whom the Nazis intended to liquidate when they conquered Britain (Virginia Woolf was very distressed to learn that she, too, was on this list). When the list was made public after the war, another “honoree,†Rebecca West, wrote to Coward:
my dear the people we should have been seen dead with.
¶ And in After the Victorians, AN Wilson writes a threnody of sorts for the prisoners of various states who were so much more numerous after World War II than before. It is impossible not to think of Abu Ghraib:
No Western state can be absolved ffrom the charge of abusing its prisons and prison camps during the twentieth century. The atrocities which took place under the cover of war can be rehearsed endlessly, and should never be allowed to be forgotten; but the imagination can still fail to absorb the sheer enormity of it all: not merely the numbers of dead, nor even the disgusting things done, sometimes for the sake of casual sadism. What shocks, almost more than anything, is that at the end of the Second World War, a war which historians still speak of as one of liberation, so many more millions of human beings should have remained imprisoned and enslaved than at its beginning.