Morning Read: Matter of Concernment
¶ In Moby-Dick, it is a “matter of concernment” for Ishmael to find cheap lodgings in New Bedford. The simple thing would be to sign on with a whaler from that port, but Ishmael prefers significance to simplicity, and is determined to wait for the Nantucket packet so that he can sail from “the Tyre of this Carthage.”
Excuse me, but is this the fabled New World? Or did I miss a stop? Chapter 2 is so loaded with classical and Biblical allusions — not to mention a bogus “black letter” writer of whose work Ishmael claims to have the only copy (a ridiculous pretension in the Gutenberg Age) — that Ishmael seems almost as demented by his reading as Don Quixote.
¶ As Don Quixote sets out on his quest, he imagines how his adventures will be written up.
“No sooner had rubicund Apollo spread over the face of the wide and spacious earth the golden strands of his beauteous hair, no sooner had diminutive and bright-hued birds with dulcet tongues greeted in sweet, mellifluous harmony the advent of rosy dawn, who, forsaking the soft couch of her zealous consort, revealed herself to mortals thorugh the doors and balconies of the Manchegan horizon, than the famous knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, abandoning the downy bed of idleness…”
And you have to wonder why, with an imagination that worked-up, Don Quixote had to leave home in the first place. But of course imagination must have some scraps of sense impression to work with. In Don Quixote’s case, mounting Rocinante is enough to unspool the dream.
Can we say that there are two sorts of travelers? The ones who see nothing but what they expect to see, and the ones who are disappointed by seeing nothing that they expected?
¶ Another book on the list, this round, is A N Wilson’s After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. The second chapter, “Rupees and Virgins” (the first compares and contrasts Wilhelm II and his uncle, Edward VII), Wilson sounds the Imperial project in terms that as recently as twenty years ago might have sounded reactionary but that now seem only cautionary, as we contemplate the half-baked ruins of so many national projects that followed the collapse of empire at the beginning of the last century. He quotes from a novel by H G Wells:
But is it our business to preserve the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic inconclusiveness? Better plunder than paralysis, better fire and sword than futility.
I share Wilson’s horror at this profoundly adolescent complaint. Which is better, despotic peace or free holocaust? Not since 1789 has one political execution advanced the cause of liberty, while eruptions of civic chaos have only intensified the fears that leach nutrients from the soil of liberty.