Morning Read: Squillions
A pattern seems to be developing. I begin the Morning Read with Moby-Dick. Then I put Melville down and pick up Cervantes, looking forward to the breath of sanity.
¶ Now that Modernism has subsided, we’re more likely to confront Moby-Dick as Melville’s contemporaries did than to see the novel as an amazing precursor of the latest trends. And we’ll probably read it by natural, rather than symbolic, light. One could mine the following passage from Chapter 4 (“The Counterpane”) for hidden meanings, but the surface is fairly rich:
At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow mail in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a creature.
¶ Meanwhile, the freshly knighted (and benighted) Don Quixote sets forth on his quest — by heading home for supplies. The key to the man’s madness is that his world has been depopulated of all ordinary folk. Everyone is a cavalier or the victim of a cavalier. This is the prevailing fantasy of aristocracy from the moment that it establishes itself, and Don Quixote has completely succumbed to it. When the teasing merchant begs to see a picture of Dulcinea before “confessing” her paramount beauty — an act “so prejudicial to the empresses and queens of Alcarria and Extramadura” — Don Quixote cannot even imagine that he is being mocked.
¶ A very long chapter in After the Victorians, and I’m not sure that I know what it was all about. Politics, poor relief, and votes for women; also the hypocrisy, or at least the elitism, of Beatrice Webb. Who was Hillaire Belloc, by the way? Among other things, the subject of a biography by A N Wilson, who here rather takes familiarity with the man for granted.
¶ Opened The Letters of Noël Coward. I have no idea how much of this I’ll get through every day. Coward’s correspondence is embedded in editor Barry Day’s commentary. I can’t decide how I feel about the word “squillions,” as in “squillions of kisses to all” (Coward to his mother, 1912). It might have made a nice title for the correspondence.