Morning Read:
En boca de la fama
¶ Now do we know who those dusky phantoms were, bobbing so gothically about the Pequod before her embarkation, latterly bumping so furtively within the hold. They’re Ahab’s own boat crew, enlisted at his own expense, and in contravention of the joint-owners’ ideas about a captain’s prudence. If what I’ve just written is incomprehensible, then I have captured the spirit of today’s reading.
More than an adventure story, Moby-Dick is a romance, stuffed with wishful dreams.
…but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent — those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations…
What utter balderdash! There are no such unchanging communities, especially in Asia, which has always hummed with commerce of every kind. Ishmael’s is the paedophilic dream of Western colonizers, always dreaming of yet-untouched lands.
¶ Chapter XXXVII of Don Quixote is the most convivial so far. There is no violence, but only a convivial dinner, after which our hero addresses his friends on the superiority of arms over letters — a venerable topic at the time.
Had I but world enough and time, I would study this chapter, in order to plumb its humanism. The effort made by Don Fernando, by the noble ladies, and, most of all, by Cervantes himself, to make a space in which Don Quixote can be comfortable and even honored is enormously heart-warming, and whatever need there might be to advance the story, the chapter is essentially a grand pause, a sigh of respect for the differences between men and women of good will.
Even so, as a man of his time, Cervantes cannot help marking a great distinction — an unbridgeable divide, really — between the gentlefolk and the peasants, among whom Sancho and the innkeeper figure as insensitive, unimaginative dolts (mentecato).