Morning Read: Noble Lords
¶ In Moby-Dick, a long evening at the Spouter Inn, culminating in one of the most peculiar meetings in literature: pretending to be asleep, Ishmael watches Queequeg disrobe and, in the process, reveal his startling tattoos. Something of a noble savage, Queequeg is quick to purge his space of the interloping Ishmael, but quick, too, to stand down when pacified by the landlord.
The barkeep’s leg-pulling discussion of Queequeg’s sideline in shrunken heads made me think of “countless” tedious curtain-raising skits, as well as the rather sweet encounter between the prompter and the major-domo near the end of Capriccio — where, however, the device of protracted misunderstanding has none of the samed throat-clearing effect.
¶ In case we doubted that Don Quixote is really out of his mind, Cervantes has him beating up muletiers who, in order to water their animals, want only to get to the water-trough on which the deranged aristocrat has deposited his armor during the vigil of his dubbing. The landlord convinces Don Quixote that four hours of vigil is enough, dubs him, and gets him out of the inn.
He asked if he had any money; Don Quixote replied that he did not have a copper blanca, because he never had read in the histories of knights errant that any of them ever carried money.
I haven’t read the great Renaissance epics that inflamed Don Quixote, but his observation is true enough of the medieval romances, whose world has been scrupulously stripped of all commercial references. Having started out as protection-racket thugs who got what they wanted by the threat of violence, Europe’s aristocrats never ceased regretting the growth of the “money economy.”
¶ In “The Land,” A N Wilson meditates on the end of the English countryside, depopulated by the Industrial Revolution only to be swallowed up by suburbs and motorists. The theme that runs through the chapter is the idea that to discover something is to destroy it. “The extent to which the human race would try to become the lords of petroleum, instantly thereby becoming its slaves, would change the subsequent map of the world.”