08 October 2007

declensions

“Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Widsom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his god.” (321-322)

"'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind, poor fellow! But what's that he says now--hist!'
'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Why, he's getting it by heart--hist! again.'
'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Well, that's funny.'
'And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow, especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the scare crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket." (335)

Melville, Moby-Dick



04 October 2007

one day ticket

summer find: Ottawa Chautauqua, one day ticket, June 21, 1898

simmering

"The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration--to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of men, and makes society possible...Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm."
Emerson, "The Over-Soul"

"I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil."
Whitman

"'I sees! O Jesus! I sees!' and still another, without words, like bubbles rising in water."
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Compare all, especially this last, to Durkheim's sense of "collective effervescence," the force of excitation as a social fact.