Morning Read:
Unsinkable?
¶ From After the Edwardians, I learn that nobody referred to the Titanic as “unsinkable” (without the qualifier “practically,” that is) until after she sank. We must also not overlook the Duchess of Cambridge’s capsule history of the Nineteenth Century:
Alas! All the dearest countries that my heart loved best have been stolen (I can’t give it another name)… Hanover, which is the cradle of our English family, Hesse is mine and Nassau was my dear own mother’s; so you may judge of my feelings at the moment; that is the moment of Germany becoming one nation.
The Duchess was Queen Mary’s grandmother.
¶ Another short chapter in Moby-Dick, “The Pulpit.” And that’s really what the chapter is about — the pulpit, that is, and the ship’s ladder that the parson not only climbs to reach it but also pulls up behind him. Odd, yes; but not interesting. Considering the nautical context of all of this, I find it odd that Melville alludes to two citadels, Quebec and Ehrenbreitstein, but I don’t mind his doing so, because the second comparison occasions a lovely flourish: “a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.”
Tomorrow (I peeked): a longish sermon.
¶ Blink, and you’ll miss Don Quixote’s famous encounter with the windmills. It is all over in about a page. The ensuing adventurous — the attack on the friars and the battle with the Basque squire — is quite elaborately left up in the air at the end of the chapter. An early cliff-hanger?
Noël Coward pays his first visit to the United States (to New York, actually) in a short chapter that’s divided in three parts (Coward’s jocular “pretend” diary, written to entertain his mother; and his friendships, respectively, with Alexander Woollcott and Neysa McMein), none of which touches on the reason for Coward’s trip, which had something to do with his play, The Last Trick. Maybe I misssed something.