Level of disconnect beyond the norm, I can turn the page and sink deep in between the lines, don’t we all love a well-told story? I cannot find solace and I see no point in watching the coma-seizure-Alzheimer’s-ADD-inducing intense bombarding flicker of vapid irregular light patterns interspersed with subconscious-level psyche demands. No, I seek for my soul the dark trenches delved, the earth’s horizon stretched, the bright heavens launched by letters. The breath between the words, therein I would dwell, negative of the black ink, the meaning hidden within the words to either side.
I’ll examine moonstone shards on a cold northeastern beach, walk the hot dark mud of a southern riverbank, catch salt spray and spindrift from wild seas, watch the crescent moon grin through the mountain pines. When time and travel mean I cannot do such things in person, you can find me curled beneath a blanket sipping tea on the couch and I’ll be in Egypt, in the Everglades, in the Himalayas, in the South Seas.
It’s a long cold wet winter and I’m starting again, for the third time, on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. This book continues to change; I’ll find myself skimming over the tops of the words and then plunge deep, read and read and breathlessly re-read a passage that seems to calculate and clarify the sum of everything. The next time I go looking for that passage, I won’t find it, or I won’t find the import of it. Clarity, though brilliant, does not always maintain.
My much-loved copy’s thin pages are worn and marked and dog-eared and wine-stained. The spine is broken dead-center but at least I never dropped it in the tub. I enter this book each time with a sense of embattlement, a mixed thrill of dread and ferocity, anticipating the encounters not only with Leviathan, but also Ahab.
A favorite chapter is The Mat-Maker. Humor me.
It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-colored waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of revery lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self.
I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.
There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.
Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance - aye, chance, free will, and necessity - no wise incompatible - all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course - its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.
You can read it all on your lunch break.
I’ll examine moonstone shards on a cold northeastern beach, walk the hot dark mud of a southern riverbank, catch salt spray and spindrift from wild seas, watch the crescent moon grin through the mountain pines. When time and travel mean I cannot do such things in person, you can find me curled beneath a blanket sipping tea on the couch and I’ll be in Egypt, in the Everglades, in the Himalayas, in the South Seas.
It’s a long cold wet winter and I’m starting again, for the third time, on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. This book continues to change; I’ll find myself skimming over the tops of the words and then plunge deep, read and read and breathlessly re-read a passage that seems to calculate and clarify the sum of everything. The next time I go looking for that passage, I won’t find it, or I won’t find the import of it. Clarity, though brilliant, does not always maintain.
My much-loved copy’s thin pages are worn and marked and dog-eared and wine-stained. The spine is broken dead-center but at least I never dropped it in the tub. I enter this book each time with a sense of embattlement, a mixed thrill of dread and ferocity, anticipating the encounters not only with Leviathan, but also Ahab.
A favorite chapter is The Mat-Maker. Humor me.
It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-colored waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of revery lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self.
I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.
There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.
Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance - aye, chance, free will, and necessity - no wise incompatible - all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course - its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.
You can read it all on your lunch break.
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