1340. The Afterlife of Moles
My mother just hated them—moles, I mean—and if you were a child of hers, your earliest premonition of Ahab had to be the sight of her, out in the backyard, smoking, frowning, and plotting to destroy her own version of the White Whale. It was trench warfare: the moles would dig up the yard, pissing my mother off, big time, and my mother would stick garden hoses into the underground passages through which they, the moles, would go about their business, and whose upward and visible signs were the mounds of dirt that would drive her, my mother, to a state of more than domestic Fury. And then, having set out the means of flushing out her enemy, she would sit back, shovel in hand, watching and waiting, waiting and watching.
She got one once. My brother, four or five at the time, over-heard her describe her gruesome triumph to a neighbor.
“Mommy, do Moles go to Heaven?”
“I hope not!” she replied with confusing candor.
“Why did you say that to him?” I asked.
“I had to tell the truth!” she answered.
And she does. Always—have to tell what she regards as the truth, no matter what.
Note: What’s there to add to the Truth?
1341. “In the society of their common danger his innocence might serve to protect him”
Montaigne, “Of Solitude”
In this essay, Montaigne seeks to gather near the company of ancient philosophers who regard the most extreme solitude as the sole means of utmost good, the only really solid tax shelter, where we are certain to be unencumbered by any importuning that would distract us from the calm and clarity that, according to their estimate, is the currency of the single secure value available to us.
Getting there is quite a trip, one replete with all kinds of backtracking, real or apparent. Thus, on the road to the Absolute Hermitage, we are struck by human, maybe even humane landscape, that seems to signal a move in the wrong direction. Crowds are contagious, Montaigne reminds us, and so if you happen to, or have to be, in one, you’d better be super careful:
Merchants who go to sea are in the right when they are cautious that those who embark with them in the same bottom be neither dissolute blasphemers nor vicious other ways, looking upon such society as unfortunate. And therefore it was that Bias pleasantly said to some, who being with him in a dangerous storm implored the assistance of the gods: “Peace, speak softly,” said he, “that they may not know you are here in my company.”—[Diogenes Laertius]—And of more pressing example, Albuquerque, viceroy in the Indies for Emmanuel, king of Portugal, in an extreme peril of shipwreck, took a young boy upon his shoulders, for this only end that, in the society of their common danger his innocence might serve to protect him, and to recommend him to the divine favour, that they might get safe to shore.
I wonder if you’re with me: I, for one, find the sight of the viceroy taking a boy on his shoulders, in the midst of great peril, pretty amazing, and hardly comprehended by any calculus of self-interest, ancient or modern, with which I am very familiar. I wonder if you’re with me in suspecting that something other than the usual calculations of looking out for número uno are at work in an arrangement that could well keep the kid dry while the potentate sucks up water. I wonder if you’re with me in thinking that even the most lockstep or devious path to the Capital of Self-Interest may get sidetracked by a love of others so devious that it defeats even the stratagems of self-interest; a love of others that may prove to be the royal road to the greater good after all.
1349. “But I shall see it reanimated”
Walton, The Life of Dr. John Donne
Walton speaks received doctrine here, which, of course, supplies its own comfort and joy, but reading this, I was lifted up by something else for a second. This something is no doubt rooted in the standard promise of Resurrection canonically tendered here: the routes from that promise to various renaissance, romantic, and modern renovations of a fatigued sense of sight are well marked. Less definitely delineated is what is lost in these translations. And what is lost, precisely, must be lost, because it cannot be defined. This loss is as much cause for celebration as consolation. What is “it” that “I shall see reanimated,” according to the more or less secular renderings of Scripture? What is “it” whose promised revival is magnetic enough to draw forth any Magi of the heart and mind to that momentary jubilee of joyful anticipation, followed by the equally brief funeral service for the foretaste of that revival, a foretaste that fades the instant it is coaxed by our teasing mind to venture out of the sweet session of a swaddled infant thought and expose itself to the cold air of explicit hope? What is “it” whose reanimation we never really cease to hope to see?
Isn’t it everything, grown vague now, that we hope to see vivid again?
Note: “He was earnest and unwearied in the search of knowledge, with which his vigorous soul is now satisfied, and employed in a continual praise of that God that first breathed it into his active body: that body, which once was a Temple of the Holy Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust:—
But I shall see it re-animated” (Izaak Walton, February 15, 1639).