Morning Read: Not Worth Staying At
¶ Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 9 October 1749 is magnificently typical. He begins with reference to his son’s route frm Venice to Rome, “which … I advised you to make along the coast of the Adriatic, through Rimini, Loretto, Ancona, etc, places that are all worth seeing, but not worth staying at.” About Rome itself, he writes powerfully about the papacy and even more trenchantly about the Jesuits
whose Society I look upon to be the most able and best governed society in the world, Get acquainted, if you can, with their General, who always resides at Rome; and who, though he has no seeming power out of his own Society, has (it may be) more real influence over the whole world, than any temporal Prince in it. They have almost engrossed the education of youth, they are, in general, confessors to most of the Princes in Europe; and they are the principal missionaries out of it; which three articles give them a most excessive influence, and solid advantages … Converse with them, frequent them, court them; but know them.
¶ Chapter 96 of Moby-Dick, “The Try-Works,” is as overwritten as any in this monstrous book, but its tone is consistent, almost disciplined. The only false note is the ridiculous mathematical observation about “bodies gliding along the cycloid.” The description of the ship’s cutting through the sea at night, its try-pots blazing and smoking, the “barbaric brilliancy” of the sailors’ teeth against their matted, tawny faces, is remarkably free of Melville’s distracting irrelevancies. Soon enough, however, the prophet steps forth.
Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true — not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet.
¶ Don Quixote admonishes the page whom the party encounters on the road:
… for what does it matter if you are killed in the first battle or skirmish, or are shot by artillery, or blown up by a mine? It is all dying, and the end of the story, and according to Terence, the soldier killed in battle looks better than the one who is safe and sound in flight, and the good soldier achieves as much fame as his obedience to his captains and to those who command him.
Really.
¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward debuts at Las Vegas and triumphs in his first television “special.” A passing phrase in a letter from Blue Harbour triggered a bit of gag reflex, so fiendishly did it capture the meretriciousness of television, a falsity that makes genuine theatre look as true as Euclid:
They seem to have done good preparatory work on the show and brought the plans for the set, which look very exciting. 68 feet in depth and with the series of curtains which will part and roll themselves up into pillars as Mary [Martin] and I advance for our entrance…
From time to time, I look back on the Fifties as a golden age of television. But what it was the golden age of was pretentious junk.