Morning Read: Timor Jack
An abbreviated read today, as I spent most of the morning trying to find the source, in the Decameron, of the “exemplary novel” of the curioso impertinente that takes up today’s and the next two chapters of Don Quixote. Can it be X, viii, the tale of Titus, Gisippus, and Sophronia? My morning reads would be but poor skimmings if I did not from time to time drop everything to make connections between what I’m reading and what I’ve read.
¶ There I go, sounding like Melville. Chapter 45, “The Affidavit,” seems aimed at adventure-starved boys. Yes — believe it or not! — sperm whales can be so individually distinctive that they’re recognized on successive voyages, so much so that some of them are given nicknames! Timor Jack! Don Miguel! Morquan! One begins looking for the one with the red nose. Here we have, as a parenthesis of sorts, the brief but rich account of what a certain sailor did with his time in the three years between harpooning the same whale twice:
… happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior, where he traveled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions.
To someone like myself, for whom home life is far more adventurous than I should like it to be (“Notice: hot water will be turned off tomorrow between 10 AM and 4 PM”), Moby-Dick is a vast duney desert, and phrases like “poisonous miasmas” are the oases that sustain me.