Morning Read:
Knick-Knackically
¶ Lord Chesterfield can’t be charged with having invented “cool,” but his passionate dispassion and his anxious dislike of enthusiasm have a modern note. To his son, in Italy at the time:
… do not become a Virtuoso of small wares. Form a taste of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, if you please, by a careful examination of the works of the best ancient and modern artists; those are liberal arts, and a real taste and knowledge of them become a man of fashion very well. But beyond certain bounds, the Man of Taste ends, and the frivolous Virtuoso begins.
¶ Moby-Dick: Chapters 94 and 95. No, we are not there yet, not nearly.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affection, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, — Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come, let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
What repels me about this passage is the bedecking of frankly carnal pleasure in the high-flying abstractions of Scripture.
¶ In Don Quixote, our hero descends into the Cave of Montesinos, where he encounters the heroes of old legends, enchanted by Merlin. Sancho is distressed by his master’s account.
“Holy God!” shouted Sancho. “Is it possible that there are in the world enchanters and enchantments so strong that they have turned my master’s good sense into foolishness and madness? Oh, Señor, Señor, for God’s sake think about what you are doing, and take back your honor, and don’t believe this nonsense that has reduced and lessened your good sense!”
“Since you love me, Sancho, you speak in this fashion,” said Don Quixote, “and since you have little experience in the things of this world, all things that are in any way difficult seem impossible to you; but in the course of time, as I have already said, I shall recount to you some of what I have seen down there, which will make you believe what I have recounted here, whose truth admits neither argument nor dispute.”
Cognitive dissonance erupts when Cervantes describes the enchanted body of Durandarte stretched out on a marble selpuchre: I start hearing Titurel’s sonorous voice calling from his crypt, in Parsifal.
¶ Squillions takes us to Las Vegas, where Noël Coward was contracted to entertain in 1955. As a man of the theatre, Coward appreciated the place for what it was.
In the classier casinos beams of light shoot down from baroque ceilings on the masses of earnest morons flinging their money down the drain. The sound is fascinating, a steady hum of conversation against a background of rhumba music and the noise of the fruit machines, the clink of silver dollars, quarters and nickels, and the subdued shouts of the croupiers. There are lots of pretty women about but I think, on the whole, sex takes a comparatively back seat. Every instinct and desire is concentrated on money. I expected that this would exasperate me but oddly enough it didn’t. The whole fantasia in on such a colossal scale that it is almost stimulating. … The gangsters who run the place are all urbane and charming. I had a feeling that if I opened a rival casino I would be battered to death with the utmost efficiency, but if I remained on my own ground as a most highly paid entertainer, I could trust them all the way.
How much I would love this book if it only contained nothing but the letters of Noël Coward!