Morning Read:
Thank God I am German
¶ Lord Chesterfield denies the existence of unconditional love. To his son:
Neither is my affection for you that of a mother, of which the only, or at least the chief objects, are health and life: I wish them both most heartily; but, at the same time, I confess they are by no means my principal care.
My object is to have you fit to live; which, if you are not, I do not desire that you should live at all.
Now that I’m an old man, I altogether agree with Chesterfield: there is a condition of being unfit to live, and nothing is sadder. But, writing these words to his son, what was he thinking? He would be the first to counsel his son against such blunt frankness. And he explodes the idea that his paternal status makes his advice “special,” by altering the manner in which young Stanhope might hear them:
“It is not a natural affection, there being in reality no such thing; for, if there were, some inward sentiment must necessarily and reciprocally discover the parent to the child, and the child to the parent, without any exterior indications, knowledge, or acquaintance whatsoever; which never happened since the creation of the world, whatever poets, romance, or novel writers, and such sentiment-mongers, may be pleased to say to the contrary.
This is the blind spot that debilitates Chesterfield’s worthy advice. The man was wise, but not wise enough.
¶ In Moby-Dick, Melville ruminates on the pleasures of daydreaming atop the masts — once you get used to it. Between his “Platonic” inattentiveness to the seas before him, and his utter misunderstanding of the “steps” of the Egyptian pyramids, I’m not sure that I would trust Melville to tell me his phone number.
The middle of the chapter is dedicated to a lengthy discussion of the crows-nest, which is an invention, our narrator complains, that ships like the Pequod don’t yet boast. Melville goes on for ten times the necessary length, but it’s clear that he’s having a lot of fun writing what he knows. It’s the sort of thing, however, that David Foster Wallace learned to discipline, so that it would be as much fun to read as to write.
¶ As the priest and the barber continue to have Quixote-free encounters in the wilderness — in today’s chapter, with the beautiful Dorotea, also a victim of the lusts that have ruined Cardenio’s life by stealing his Luscinda, Don Quixote begins to read like a first draft of Don Juan. I wrote, the other day, that Cervantes would snort if you were to accuse him of padding his story, and, today, he does snort:
Most happy and fortunate were the days when the bold knight Don Quixote of La Mancha sallied forth into the world, since, because of his honorable resolve to resusictate and return to the world the lost and dying order of knight errantry, we can now enjoy in our own time, which is so in need of joyful entertainment, not only the sweetness of his true history, but also the stories and episodes that appear in it and are, in some ways, no less agreeable and artful and true history, but also the stories and episodes that appear in it and are, in some ways, no less agreeable and artful than the history itself, which, following its tortuous, winding, and meandering thread, recounts that as the priest was preparing to console Cardenio, he was prevented from doing so by a voice that reached his ears…
Very bald!
¶ In Squillions, a chapter devoted to Coward’s friendship with Marlene Dietrich. “What they had in common, other than a genuine affections, was the mutual and admiring recognition that each was a magnificent self-creation.” I will say that Dietrich is an arresting letter-writer. Here she is on the shank of an intense love affair:
I was taken to the plane first. He came later. Walked by me and took a seat on the other side furthest away from me in the seat section in the back of the already made-up berths. The empty plane took off. He had three drinks and went to his berth without ever looking at me. Thank God I am German. Otherwise I would have jumped out of the plane.