Moby Dick by Herman Melville

"Call me Ishmael." I think that when I was younger everyone knew that that was the first line of Moby Dick, even if they didn't know anything else about the book. I wonder how many people know that know, especially young people.

The thing is, it's not really the beginning of the book. Before we get to the story there are 79 quotes or "extracts" about whales from a wide variety of sources which take up 10 pages in my edition. This ought to be, but probably isn't for most people, a sort of foreshadowing of what is to come in the rest of the book.

Moby Dick is unlike any other book I've ever read. It's impossible to classify. It is fiction, and non-fiction; science, and history; geography, and anthropology; philosphy, and metaphysics; and much more besides with a great adventure novel making sporadic appearances in the midst of it all.

By the time you finish reading Moby Dick, you will know how to spot, harpoon, and cut up a whale; and how to render sperm oil. You will know the name and description, and habits of every sort of whale that Melville, who had been a sailor himself, knew anything about. You will have intimate knowledge of whales from head to toe: what their eyes, ears, spout holes, tails and innards are like. You will know about whaling ships, and the different jobs of the sailors who man the ships. You will know how to make a peg leg and a harpoon. You will know about friendship, and seafaring humor and stories, and fear, and obsession.

I'm not sure if I should have begun this post by telling you all this, because reading it might have put me off the book forever. I remember reading War and Peace which has constant interruptions of the narrative for chapters about Tolstoy's historical/political theories, and thinking, "Just get on with the #$%& story!" But somehow Melville gets away with it. I think it must be due to the enthusiasm of the teacher who loves his subject so much, and transmits his passion to his students.

I'm sure that most of my readers will know the outline of the narrative of Moby Dick, but briefly, in case it has slipped into 21st century obscurity somehow . . . . The story relates the voyage of the Pequod, a whaler out of Nantucket (Oh, you are also going to learn some things about Nantucket.), and its captain, Ahab, who on a previous voyage, lost his leg to the huge white whale, Moby Dick. The crew, including our narrator, Ishmael, signs on for a typical whaling voyage. They know it will be quite dangerous, and that they won't see land for three or four years, but they don't know that in the Captain's fevered mind, it is a voyage for vengeance.

I'm not going to say much about the narrative itself, because the way it unfolds is part of the reader's own voyage, but I want to say a bit about the characters, because they are so important to the book. We get to know several of the sailors on the Pequod very well, and it would be fascinating to sit down with any one of them and hear his story. The first mate, Starbuck, is a very upright man, who just wants to do his job well and get back home to his wife and little boy. The second mate Stubb, is more relaxed and generally of good cheer. We also really get to know Ahab, who sometimes begins to see through the cloud of vengeance that surrounds him sees that he could overcome it, but chooses not to. Because of these changes of mood, he is a much more rounded character than he might have been. Then there is the mysterious Fedallah, about whom we known nothing much, other than that he is a Parsee, and that he knows some secret about Ahab, and Moby Dick, and has prophesied how the captain's story will end.

My favorite character is Queequeg, the island prince, and harpooneer whom we meet at the beginning of the book, and my favorite aspect of the book is his friendship with Ishmael.

Ishmael, having arrived in New Bedford, from whence he will take a ship to Nantucket, is searching for an economical place to stay until the ship arrives. He finally finds the Spouter Inn, where he is told that there is no room available, except for one that he will have to share with another boarder. The landlord is rather mysterious about said boarder, and Ishmael is suspicious, but he has no other choice.

The other boarder has not arrived by the time Ishmael goes to bed, but when he finally arrives, Ishmael is taken aback by this large dark man with harpoon and tomahawk, who is tattooed from head to toe. Queequeg is fairly shocked himself, but they manage to settle down for the night.

On the second evening Ishmael and Queequeg have dinner, and then Ishmael tells us:

Soon I proposed a social smoke; and producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us.

If there lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.

I love this passage, and whole story of this friendship, but when I think about what it would be like to try to teach this book in a 21st century classroom, I just shake my head. Not only the friendship which would probably be given a very different interpretation in that classoom, and the political incorrectness of much of the book, but the sheer length of the book makes it seem very difficult to do successfully. I wonder if anyone tries.

It is probably obvious by now that I really liked this book, and would highly recommend it. I should caution you, though, that you need to have some good, long stretches of quiet time to spend with it. It isn't light reading my any means.

AMDG

Addendum: Amusing (I hope) disclaimer. I have a really difficult time reading old books with disintegrating pages. Immediately on opening them, my eyes begin to burn and itch, and my vision gets blurry--obviously not the best conditions for enjoying a book. As you can see above, my copy is one of those. So, after putting up with it for a bit, I decided to get a library copy.

Well, this is a big, heavy book, and as I have gotten older, it has been increasing difficult for me to read big, heavy books. The weight hurts my legs, and it hurts my hands to hold them, so I started reading a Kindle version that I've had for a long time, but I didn't really want to do that and I was spending a lot of time in the car, so I finally ended up listening to most of it on an Audible recording. The narrator was Frank Muller, and he was very good, so you might want to try this on your next long trip.

Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal by David Kline

On May 9, 2002, I made my first purchase from Amazon, and it was David Kline's Great Possessions; however, I did not know it was David Kline's Great Possessions. Friends on a listserv were talking about how great Wendell Berry's books were, so I decided to buy one. A search for Wendell Berry on Amazon turned up Great Possessions. I want to say that it was the only result of the search, but how could that have been? Maybe Amazon wasn't selling books from his publisher at the time. Maybe it was just the cheapest result. That might well have been it. I see I only paid $4.94.

Needless to stay, I was pretty unhappy when I started reading the book and realized that the author wasn't Berry, who wrote only the two-page foreword, but someone I'd never heard of before, and yet it was a fortuitous mistake. It's a wonderful book. I remember writing at the time that reading Great Possessions was like having a friend walking you around his property and showing you all the things he loved. I didn't, however, get very far into the book. I don't know why, but I always meant to get back to it.

Great Possessions is a collection of essays from Family Life, an Amish magazine. Because of this, the chapters are fairly short, and it is a good book to read in spare moments. Despite this fact, I did not read it in spare moments, because once I started reading, I didn't want to stop.

Kline has lived on, and farmed his property all of his life. He knows it in a very deep way. It isn't just the amount of time he has lived there, but the way he lives there. And he is so observant. I know less per square foot about the 1/6 acre that I lived on for 24 years than he knows about any square inch of his farm. This really makes me want to go outside and learn more about the 10 acres we have now, but, of course, I'm not going to do it until it gets a bit cooler.

The essays cover many different kinds of plants and animals that live on the farm, but the greatest portion of the books is devoted to birds: large and small birds, land and shore birds. It's amazing to me the 100s of different species that his family spots every year. Off the top of my head, I can only think of 18 that I see around here. Of course, I probably have several species of sparrows, but I can't tell them apart.

It's rather ironic that this book written by a man who uses very little modern technology in his life constantly sent me to my phone or Kindle. I had to find out, "What does a red-eyed vireo look like? A cecropia moth? A serviceberry tree? (Gorgeous. The next tree I plant will be one of these.) What does an eastern bluebird sound like? There were times when it took me ten minutes to read one page because I was looking up so many things.

I learned a lot of interesting things while reading the book, but I am only going to mention three. One is that the horned lark builds a little patio of pebbles on one side of its nest. (It is permissible to share the photo below for non-commercial purpose. I don't really understand how it works, so I put the we address in the rollover.)

Photo credit: Amy Evenstad

The second is that some birds, one being the American Golden-Plover, migrate to South America. I find this rather wonderful to think about. In the fall, the plover leaves the wintery arctic, where it breeds, flies through the fall, and the perpetual summer of the tropic, and reaches South America in their spring, and stays through the southern summer. If a human made this trip, he would have to take a huge wardrobe.

And third, many hawks migrating from the north follow the Appalachian mountains. There are a few spots, including Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, and Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve in Duluth, MN,where the flyway narrows due to the physical characteristics of the land, and so hundreds of thousands of hawks are funneled through these small areas. There are times when you can see more than 10,000 in a day.

Most of the essays are beautiful, or informative, and mostly upbeat, but the essay titled Farewell to the Giants made me tear up a bit. Kline tells of making a visit with his son to an old-growth woodland that abutted their property, and which was soon to be logged by new owners.

Arising from our cushiony bed of moss, we walked through the woods to look and admire for the last time. We paused beneath red and white oaks and poplars towering sixty feet to their first limbs. Their branches, joining high overhead, gave the impression of a green-and-gold cathedral ceiling supported by massive wooden columns. In autumns past, like my older brothers before me, I would often take a morning off on the pretense of hunting for squirrels to come here and revel in this grandeur--an experience both humbling and exhilarating.

The description reminds of Mallorn trees in Lothlórien (Lord of the Rings). It's not so much a physical resemblance, as the feeling that it evokes. 

There are some chapters near the end that are instructive and are giving me ideas. One is called Planting for Wildlife and one is Winter Bird Feeding. I tried some summer bird feeding this year with absolutely no success, but maybe I'll do better in the winter. I want to make a bird list. And I need a pair of binoculars. I am definitely keeping this book.

AMDG

The Shelf

August 1

A bit late posting this, but I did take it on July 1.

June 1, 2018

We Hold These Truths:Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition by John Courtney Murray, S. J.

It has been a long time since I have written anything here, partly because I have been having out-of-town company, and partly because I have been busy with other things, but mostly because I have been very unwise in my choice of books. It is not that I should not have been reading these particular books, but that I have been reading them at the same time, because two of them, the Big Book that I wrote about before, and this book by Fr. Murray, are political, philosophical, and discuss situations and authors whose work is unfamiliar to me. And the third book I'm reading is a long novel wherein there is a great deal of pedagogical material dispersed within the narrative.

However, I have finally finished We Hold These Truths, and am very glad to be able to say so. I thought several times that I would just quit, and move on to something else, but I was really interested in learning what I could from the book. It was published in 1960, and that means both that some of the situations that he is discussing are very different than they were then, and that his solutions seem well-nigh impossible at this point.

Sometimes it is downright disheartening, one of the saddest passages being this one:

In America we have been rescued from the disaster of ideological parties. They are a disaster because, where such parties exist, power becomes a special kind off prize. The struggle for power is a partisan struggle for the means whereby the opposing ideology may be destroyed. It has been remarked that only in a disintegrating society does politics become a controversy over ends; it should be simply a controversy over means to ends already agreed on with sufficient unanimity.

Before I go any further, I would like to say that I am ill-qualified to comment on most of this book. Political theory is definitely not my area of interest or expertise. I am, in fact, usually disinclined to pay any attention to it at all.

Part One, The American Proposition comprises almost half the book, and discusses how we can reach consensus in a pluralistic society. Fr. Murray says that when he asks groups of people this question, they generally respond that we can't. It always amazes me that while I was in grade school (remember this was 1960) being taught about our government, and living in what seemed to be a very patriotic world, the foundations of our country must have already been getting very weak.

Fr. Murray describes public consensus as:

"a set of ideas, widely held by the community . . . that certain uses of power are 'wrong' that is contrary to the established interest and value system of the community." It is "essentially a body of doctrine which has attained wide, if not general, acceptance." This body of doctrine contains "principles," "tenets," "rules," "standards" and "criteria" of judgment on individual cases or situations.

The quotes come from Power without Property by Professor Adolf. A. Berle.

Fr. Murray also points out that public consensus has a growing end, and that those who seek it are locked in a never-ending argument.

This definition is found within a larger discussion concerning how those in power (in this case big business) can often be controlled by public consensus. The quote is from Prof. Berle.

"Observing the American scene you note that as power goes, the present concentration has in recent years been (on the whole) relatively free from the excesses which often make concentrated power odious. Certainly this was not because historical chance located American economic power in a collection of saints. Checks (not 'balances') appeared in the form of periodic political interventions demanded by American public opinion. To explain this it becomes necessary to import a political conception--the 'public consensus' . . . So, it seems the ultimate protection of individuals lies not in the play of economic forces in free markets, but in a set of value judgments so widely accepted and deeply held in the United States that public opinion can energize political action when needed to prevent power from violating these values."  

There is a long section on the First Amendment which discusses its importance to consensus in a pluralistic society, and a problem of interpretation that arises from the amendment as to whether it requires faith or is simply an instrument of peace. In other words, must we believe that Church and State must always and everywhere be separate, or do we only agree to abide by this law because it is the only way to keep peace in a pluralistic society? He says that many Protestants would subscribe to the former, but that the latter would be the Catholic point of view, and explains why he believes this is so.

Part Two is titled Four Unfinished Arguments which arguments are:

Is It Justice?: The School Question Today - This section deals with the question of whether or not the government should support religious schools. Almost 60 years later, we're in about the same place.

Should There Be a Law?: The Question of Censorship - In what circumstances is it the government's business to impose censorship?

Is it Basket Weaving?: The Question of Christianity and Human Values - This section has to do with the City of God and the City of Man, and asks if there is any real value to merely human achievements, e.g. the works of classical antiquity. Also, there is the question of whether there is such a thing as mere human achievement, or does the inspiration for these achievements come from elsewhere.

The basket weaving in the title comes from this passage:

The old monk wove a basket one day; the next day he unwove it. The basket itself did not matter; but the weaving and unweaving of it served as a means of spending an interval, necessary to the frail human spirit, between periods of performance of the only tasks that did matter, the contemplation of heavenly things.

This is found in the description of the thinking of those who think that human works have no intrinsic value.

Are There Two or One?: The Question of the Future of Freedom - Is there only one authority that we must obey, i.e. the civil authority, or is there another, i.e. the Church, or a Natural Law that is present in all men?

Part Three is titled The Uses of Doctrine, and consists of four sections.

Doctrine and Policy in Communist Imperialism: the Problem of Security and Risk is to me one of the most interesting parts of the book. Fr. Murray discusses the Cold War and what kind of danger we were, and were not in from the Soviet Union. It is the first time I've ever read anything that discussed what the Cold War looked like from the Soviet point-of-view, and how nuclear weapons were, and were not consistent with their goals.

The Uses of a Doctrine on the Uses of Force: War as a Moral Problem discusses when the use of force is just and required, and when and how it is not.

The Doctrine is Dead: the Problem of the Moral Vacuum deals with the demise of Natural Law.

The Doctrine Lives: the Eternal Return of Natural Law discusses just that.

I would like to close with another quote from Fr. Murray, and some thoughts of my own about it.

The fact today is not simply that we hold different views but that we have become different types of men, with different styles of interior life. We are therefore uneasy in one another's presence. We are not, in fact, present to one another at all; we are absent from one another. That is, I am not transparent to the other, nor he to me; our mutual experience is that of an opaqueness. And this reciprocal opaqueness is the root of an hostility that is overcome only with an effort, if at all.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how we can overcome the hostility on even a small scale, well, I think that most of us can only overcome it one-on-one. But, something else that this passage made me think about was, how earlier in our history, I would guess up until World War II, people were still pretty much divided in many ways by their cultural heritage. There were still a lot of areas that were Irish, or Italian, or any number of different ethnic identities, but while they may have dressed, eaten, prayed, and worked differently, most of them had a common idea about what it meant to be an American.

Since then, our cultures have to a great extent merged. There has been a great deal of intermarriage. I know very few people now who are 100% Irish, or Italian, or German. We eat the same things; we eat each other's foods. We live in the same neighborhoods, and work in the same offices. And yet, there is this vast schism of ideology. I find it a bit ironic and extremely sad.

As I've said before about other books, if you are interested in this sort of thing, you will find this book worth your while, even though to a great extent its time has passed. And yet, there are eternal verities within its pages.

AMDG