Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power
I am rereading Moby Dick by Melville, and I am impressed with how much I did not see, how much I did not understand, the first time I read it, not so very long ago. I hope this will caution me, in the future, from rash judgment: perhaps one day I will see great artistic merit in famous works I currently despise!
Here is but one example of the American Milton and his ornate prose:
“AHAB SITTING ALONE, AND GAZING OUT.
“I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
“Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun – slow dived from noon – goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ‘Tis iron – that I know – not gold. ‘Tis split, too – that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!
“Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night – good night!”
In case you do not recognize what he is saying, dear reader, his monomania, his fixed idea, circles and imprisons his brain like a heavy crown (a crown made from one of the nails of the Crucifixion); the weight of his duties as a captain, and, yes, the glory of it, are alike invisible to him, in the same way as coronet cannot be seen by its wearer.
It is the cry of Hamlet. Captain Ahab is lamenting that he is so gifted and superior that he can no longer enjoy the good things in life. Like Lucifer before his fall, he cannot enjoy the pleasures of paradise.
This is a common theme that runs through the bellyaching of intellectuals: I wonder if this is the true cause of the Nausea of Sartre. There is a certain type of man for whom the ordinary pleasures of life do not please, and he takes it as a badge of honor. We can call this type of man the anti-Chesterton, for Chesterton’s appetite was healthy (to say the least!) for ordinary pleasures: songs, cigars, brown beer, the simple cheer of Christmas and Easter. Chesterton, in other words, was the first hobbit, in his girth no less than other faculties.
Melville is not condemning intellectuals, however, he is too subtle a writer for that: though he does poke his tongue into his cheek at them, because (in an earlier chapter) he describes how Ishmael, a dreamer, was too entranced by the sea during his watches in the crow’s nest to raise a whale.
“And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer….”
(Get your mind out the gutter, reader. Melville means sperm-whale oil.)
“… lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
