Morning Read:
God’s Help
I appear to have celebrated the beginning of the new season with a bibulous lunch, yesterday, shoving real work aside on the very day, after a long weekend, when I ought to have made a point of taking it up. I had thoughts of beginning with Rochefoucauld or Chesterfield, but it is all I can do to continue with the books that I’ve already started reading.
¶ in After the Edwardians, I am intrigued to learn that the incidence of circumcision among English males swelled and subsided with the size of Empire. As for the increased popularity of the practice, “Some attribute this to the pioneering skills of a Jewish doctor named Remondino.” In a curious blend of old, new, and arguably wishful thinking, this advocate of circumcision believed that the prepuce would wither away of its own, under evolotionary pressure.
The chapter, entitled “Nationalisms,” rambles in Wilsonian fashion up to the conclusion that the “small nationalisms” that followed the breakup of empires throughout the world tended to be toxic. He quotes P S O’Hagerty (1879-1955), an IRB councillor and a historian off Sinn Fein:
We adopted political assassination as a principle. We turned the whole thoughts and passions of a generation upon blood and revenge and death; we placed gunmen, mostly half-educated and totally inexperienced, as dictators with powers of life and death over large areas. We decided the moral law, and said there was no law but the law of force, and the moral law answered us. Every devilish thing we did against the British went full circule, and then boomeranged and smote us tenfold; and the cumulating effect of the whole of it was a general moral weakness and a general degredation, a general cynicism and disbelief in either virtue or decency, in goodness or uprightness or honesty.
¶ Chapter 7 of Moby-Dick, “The Chapel,” ends with a brilliantly-introduced metaphysical flourish.
Yes, there is death in this business off whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket, and come a stove boat and a stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
¶ Chapter VII of Don Quixote is transitional, beginning with the aftermath of the previous chapter’s literary criticism by fire, and then tilting, after Don Quixote’s two-week rest and recuperation, toward the enlistment (and introduction) of Sancho Panza. Sancho is credulous enough about Don Quixote’s promise of appanage kingdoms, but he can’t imagine his wife as the queen of any of them. “You know, sir, that she isn’t worth two maravedís as a queen; she’d do better as a countess, and even then she’d need God’s help.”
In Squillions, the first chapter rolls to a close as Coward’s first taste of genuine fame is interrupted by inglorious service in the “Artists’ Rifles,” whatever that might have been. From his medical report: “Cannot stand any noise and complains of constant headaches. Tremors of both hands plus superficial reflexes. Emotional and unstable. Family history bad.” One can just guess at what that judgment about Coward’s family history was based on.