dual personalities

What are you reading?

This month, I (daughter #2) had the pleasure of reading Thornton Wilder’s The Eighth Day and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick back to back. I wanted to re-read The Eighth Day promptly after blogging about it, just so that I could more carefully read and save my favorite passages. I then had an occasion to re-read Moby-Dick when a friend wanted to read it for the first time and I said I would do so along with him. As you might expect, this was a truly epic duo of great American novels, which were also surprisingly congruous. I suppose not many would agree, but I think both novels (though ~450 and over 600 words in length) are easy to read. They both have driving plots (a murder mystery and a truly suspenseful whale chase) that undergird digressions and reflections on the human condition. Both present an array of characters with very different dispositions, who represent different ways of living in the world. You may not see yourself in any single character, but I would wager that you recognize different types of people you know — and you may even come to understand them, because both novels are sympathetic to many types.

One of the pleasures of reading Moby-Dick this time around was that I was not studying it or teaching it, but could happily relate its deepest chapters to my currently less-intellectual lifestyle. Take, for example, “Stowing Down and Clearing Up,” the chapter when the Pequod sailors must clean the boat after the great mess of extracting a whale’s sperm. It’s giving, “mom cleans up the family room every night.”

But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninetey-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists all day rowing on the Line,–they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when–There she blows!–the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.

Just kidding!! But I also really had to laugh when I read this passage and thought, thank God I quit my job as Senior Program Manager:

The large importance attached to the harpooner’s vocation is evinced by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an officer called the Specksynder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooner. In those days, the captain’s authority was restricted to the navigation and general management of the vessel while over the whale-hunting department and all its concerns, the Specksnyder or Chief Harpooner reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply as senior Harpooner; and as such, is but one of the captain’s more inferior subalterns.

I mentioned that The Eighth Day, much like Moby-Dick, has some excellent and varied characters. How wonderful are these descriptions?

“On this trip he arrived with ten bottles of champagne; there were holes in his shoes and socks. No one has ever seen a successful businessman who is joyous, for joy is praise of the whole and cannot exist where there are ulterior aims. His joy was of the purest sort; it stole its gaiety from dejection and danger. What a talker he was, what a persuader! All appearance took on whatever coloring he imposed upon it. The great persuaders are those without principles; sincerity stammers.”

“Roger possessed little sense of humor. There was no second Roger lodged within his head. A sense of humor judges one’s actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope; it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation. This wider reference and longer view are not the gifts of any extraordinary wisdom; they are merely the condensed opinions of a given community at a given moment. Roger was a very serious young man.”

Or this reflection on boyhood:

Even in the best of homes, at the best of times, a boy is always in the wrong. Boys are filled with exhausting energies; they enjoy noise; they are (or where would we be?) adventurous and inquiring. They creep out onto ledges and fall into caves and two hundred men spend nights searching for them. They must hurl objects. They particularly cherish small animals and must have them near. A respect for cleanliness is as slowly and painfully acquired as mastery of the violin. They are perpetually famished and can barely be taught to eat decorously (the fork was late appearing in society). They are unable to sit still for more than ten minutes unless they are being told a story about mayhem and sudden death (or where would we be?). They receive several hundred rebukes a day. They rage at the humiliation of being male and not men.

More than anything, I love the way The Eighth Day focuses on the family, and particularly how our individual histories influence us. All the drama of the novel’s central two families, traced back for multiple generations, culminates in Wilder’s conclusion about God’s design.

The sign of God’s way is that it is strange. God is strange. . . .Here is the tree of Christ’s descent from Adam to Jesse. When Sarah–here!–was told that she would bear a son she laughed. She was an old woman. She bore Isaac–which means ‘Laughter.’ The Bible is the story of a Messiah-bearing family, but it is only one Bible. There are many such families whose Bibles have not been written. . . .Can it be that your family has been marked? Can it be that your descendants may bring forth a Messiah tomorrow or in a hundred years? That something is preparing?

Well, I don’t pretend to take this passage literally, that I am in a chain like Christ’s. But I think it is worth noting, especially in a family like mine that does feel attached to our ancestors, that the centuries go back and the centuries — the family — will move forward. The character who is voicing this point of view goes on to say, “There is no happiness equal to that of being aware that one has a part in a design,” and he does not share all of this “to counsel, encourage, or rebuke…But to share with you at this solemn season a reverent joy.” Whew! It certainly brings me joy to remember — family is design. And it is important.

*”Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” (Herman Melville, Moby-Dick)