Morning Read: Las ollas de Egipto
 
¶ A copy of Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 22 September 1749 ought to be handed out with every new cell phone, Blackberry, netbook, &c &c.
I know of no one thing more offensive to a company, than that inattention and distraction. It is showing them the utmost contempt, and people never forgive contempt. No man is distrait with the man he fears, or the woman he loves; which is a proof that every man can get the better of that distraction, when he thinks it worth his while to do so; and take my word for it, it is always worth his while.
Later on in the letter, he refers to Bacon’s reference to Queen Isabella: in a man, good appearance is a permanent letter of recommendation.
¶ In Moby-Dick, the story of Pippin, the black boy who couldn’t help jumping from the boat. Melville’s explanation of Pip’s problem is perfectly opaque to me, but I am pathologically unable to follow instructions, particularly when I am reading a novel. (I more and more regard this tome as a glorified Boy Scout Handbook.) The thing to know is that poor Pip is deranged by the experience of finding himself for a spell in the middle of the ocean, far from any vessel.
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God
While I can appreciate something of the grandeur of this passage, I cannot feel it. I have parted company, at this reach of my life, with talk of God in everyday affairs, and with references, however poetical, to divine agency. I can read about God in Scripture, but nowhere else. Although I have acquired the patience to wade through this monstrosity of a fiction that I lacked when I was young, I have lost the tolerance for mentions of God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom. It is so much bilge now.
¶ In Don Quixote, our hero is the very voice of good sense, arguing that, as all is fair in love as in war, Basilio and Quiteria ought to be forgiven by the tricked Camacho. This is all very well, but when Basilio and Quiteria decline to remain at the rich wedding feast, and take their champion away with them, Sancho is awfully sorry to leave the “cauldrons of Egypt.”
¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward rather inattentively engages an actress whose singing voice is in decline to play Mrs Erlynne in his operettic adaptation of Lady Windermere’s Fan. To the Lunts:
I have been having a terrible time with After the Ball, mainly on account of Mary Ellis’s singing voice, which, to coin a phrase, sounds like someone fucking the cat.