In Moby-Dick, as soon as the Pequod has set sail ‘and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic’, Ishmael pauses for a characteristic digression – this time a brief chapter, The Lee Shore, describing one Bulkington, a sailor who, ‘just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage,’ is immediately heading out to sea again where, like all except the author, he will meet his death:
‘The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
‘Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
‘But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!’
When I first read this, an intense young man who had given up his job to travel and write important (but, as it transpired, fatally incompetent) poetry, I memorised the whole chapter and bore it with me like a banner at a march, muttering it as a protest at the grim banality of south London streets and commuter living. Now, almost thirty years later, happy, settled, with cat and view from bedroom window, occupying the decidedly unheroic role of garden designer in Hay-on-Wye, I may lack conviction as a stormy Transcendentalist, but I still recognise the truth of what Ishmael says – of the need to escape the treacherous, slavish shore.
Perhaps the metaphor needs sedating because, of course, it seldom is or was the wildest winds of heaven and earth that conspire to wreck us. We more often succumb to a gentle but deceptively strong onshore breeze abetted by an insistent current – of social convention; habit; peer pressure; media-driven patterns of thought; fear of people’s censure; fear of individual rather than group identity; lack of imagination; preference for holding opinions rather than forming them; laziness; quiet, even unacknowledged, despair – against which deep, earnest thinking must fight with fury to keep the open independence of her sea. The lee shore is as perilous as Ishmael warned, but we are more often beached there to starve on the sands, than dashed against the rocks.
Ishmael’s portentous ‘deep, earnest thinking’ is, of course, what Socrates had in mind when he said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ This is not navel-gazing but a scrutiny of the world, the context in which every life is lived. And that world is the green and brown physical world, not the Disney-toned confection of the political map.
We have long had all the information we might need to live well, to live honestly, with self-respect and a concern for others. Little has changed over the centuries really. The first half of the Ten Commandments, rephrased a little less lithophonously, [Footnote: how about this? Exodus 20: ‘There is only one thing you need to concentrate on – don’t get distracted by other stuff, but be serious about it. Make sure you regularly take time out from your everyday chores. Look after your parents – you’ll be old too one day. Don’t go killing people, stealing, lying, having affairs or envying other people’s possessions.’ As soon as you remove the thunder and lightning, the angry old men with beards, and the blackletter Gothic diction, the Ten Commandments are revealed as sensible house-rules; a rudimentary blueprint for any new community. To compress them still further (without, I think, distortion): ‘Concentrate on the big thing, look after your parents, and don’t be a knob.’ A Twitter Decalogue.] and Christ’s first commandment make perfect sense to anyone who can accept the idea of a God. The second half and his second, the Golden Rule, are almost universally accepted (in principle, if seldom in practice) regardless of faith.
However, almost nothing we encounter in the news or media is seriously concerned with how to live, with those questions which for millennia have been regarded by sages, philosophers, kings, priests and poets as the most essential in life. The media seek to provoke reactions, rather than to foster thought. Meanwhile, technology, promoted by manufacturers and the media eager for cheap novelty news, and now indispensible to the everyday, everyminute lives of most of us, has nothing to contribute. It is extraordinary that we should allow the most dynamic force shaping modern society to be one that is oblivious to its most important questions, and can have no interest in its well-being. Our hope must lie in who we are not what we know. If who we are isn’t good enough, all the cleverness in the world won’t help.
‘How to live’ is seen as unserious – the domain of self-help books, bestsellers for the irremediably miserable, abjured by the guardians of our literary culture, gauche. But Socrates, Montaigne and others thought differently, and their examinations and ours will uncover the same evidence. [Footnote: STA’s pre-social perspective, though quiet and polite, is genuinely radical. By contrast, the great rebellious figures in history like Lenin, Marat and Che Guevara are steeped in traditional anthropocentrism and the clichés of politics and institutions. Lacking deeper roots, without love, awareness or the acceptance of haecceity, their ‘revolutions’ were no more than murderous squabbles about power. Thomas Traherne however, like STA, has seismic ideals: ‘You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the soul heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.’] The physical world is the same, and we are inseparably of that world.
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