Today, we resume the Morning Read in a fashion appropriate to the season: late. We confess, in fact, that we almost forgot all about it. We were nagged by the question that there was something that we were supposed to remember, but it was not until we glanced at the by now hypnotically familiar pile of books on the footstool that we remembered. Ah! Don Quixote. Moby-Dick.

Having avoided reading both of these books for so many years — not just gotten out of having to read them but actually kept them at a distance — I’m not surprised by the appeal of tackling them both together. Salt and pepper, what?

Both first chapters have been plundered with suspicious zeal. Everybody knows the first line of Melville’s classic: Call me Ishmael. Cervantes, in contrast, takes the best part of his first chapter to decide upon his hero’s name. In a sentence that I’m convinced must have inspired the famous Cole Porter song, “I Concentrate on You,” Ishmael muses,

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to et to sea as soon as I can.

One of the nice things about being an old duffer is that my desire to knock people’s hats off — or to silence their cell phones in the elevator — is calmed by nothing more strenuous than a walk along the river. I don’t have to jump in. (I’d like to see a picture of the intersection of 86th Street and the East River in Melville’s day.)

In contrast to the highly personal, TMI-prone Ishmael, Don Quixote can hardly be said to be aware of himself. Even in his dream of derring-do, he lives at some distance from himself.

If I, because of my evil sins, or my good fortune, meet with a giant somewhere, as ordinarily befalls knights errant, and I unseat him with a single blow, or cut his body in half, or, in short, conquer and defeat him, would it not be good to have someone to whom I could send him so that he might enter and fall to his knees before my sweet lady, and say in the humble voice of surrender: ‘I, lady, am the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the island Malindrania, defeated in single combat by the never sufficiently praised knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, who commanded me to appear before your ladyship, so that your highness might dispose of me as you chose’?”

So much for today. The effort to hold up Edith Grossman’s recent translation has quite exhausted me.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Morning Read, Reading Matter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.