quare id faciam?

Coincident

I started Moby Dick today. Started listening to it, that is, on tape. This is unremarkable, or should be, except that I've never been in the habit of listening to recorded books. Last week, in fact, was the first time. And how sorry I am, now, that I'd gone so long without giving one a try!

A couple of miles from the home of a customer for whom I'm doing a variety of projects off & on over a span of months is a public library. Getting lunch one day last week, I stopped in at this library with the thought that I might be able to check email. I had no thought, though, of borrowing anything. The location is fairly distant from where I live – another county. So I had no account there, of course, and in any case, I'm not a library user these days generally, mostly because I've got a lot on my own shelves (and desk, bed, floor, &c.) that I'm not managing to read already. But books in audio form I don't have. Why hadn't I seen an opportunity in this fact sooner? I can't think of a decent answer. But last week the opportunity confronted me in simple terms. To check email, I found, I needed a library account – and right next to the bank of computers were the books on tape. Here I've been driving 45 minutes each way in order to work on this customer's house, and am expecting to do so for days at a time recurringly through the year. I really couldn't walk out of the library, then, without something to listen to.

I looked over the collection and lighted on Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London – something short – with reading by Patrick Tull. Put it on as soon as I was in the truck, was hooked in about two minutes.

Today I took back Down and Out and picked up Moby Dick – one of those important titles I'd heretofore practically given up ever getting around to reading. Mark Bertrand's been mentioning Melville a bit lately; and it's not too long ago that Hawthorne and his circle featured in one or more Mars Hill Audio conversations, I seem to recall. There are undoubtedly reasons of this kind that Moby came to mind. But if it's a matter of choosing among things laid out in front of me now through this conjunction of circumstances, things I haven't read that one really ought to, I hardly need another reader's recommendation as cue to a good pick. My poverty of reading experience is such that I can take a step in any number of literary directions and be sure of opening up fascinating territory.

Alright now, a moment's incidental literary amusement – a parallel I could hardly have foreseen and that I can't fail to mention before I quit this post. Orwell, drawing Down and Out to a close, remarks at relative length on the inadequacy of 'lodging houses', places where you could get a cheap bed in London when he was writing. There's a shift from the narrative, reportorial voice of the greater part of the book to somewhat more direct advocacy. And you find his concerns outlined, in a way, around a particular point of emphasis: "The really bad fault of lodging-houses is that they are places in which one pays to sleep, and in which sound sleep is impossible. ... The lodging-house keepers should be compelled to provide adequate bedclothes and better mattresses, and above all to divide their dormitories into cubicles. It does not matter how small a cubicle is, the important thing is that a man should be alone when he sleeps." Well then, what do the opening scenes of Moby Dick turn out, in turn, to turn upon but a narrator's anxiety at having to sleep a little too closely with a stranger on a night in a crowded, run-down rooming house? His discomforts aren't quite comparable with the ones Orwell's describing from his days among London's 'tramps', but the matter, with Melville's character, comes to a remarkable resonance of male point of view. "No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping."

I'm of a mind to agree with both of them.

There was a nice coincidence of another kind, for the occasion of getting into this book. The house I'm working on is in a neighborhood right along the Magothy River, which runs a shortish course into the Chesapeake a little to the north of Annapolis. At the end of a neighborhood street there's a small park on a bit of shoreline prominence called (according to the map) Ulmstead Point, where I've been going sometimes to eat lunch, sitting in the truck with a view across the water. Perfect spot perhaps, in my circumstances, to hear the first-chapter prologue to Moby Dick read today.

posted by paul bowman @ 12:17 AM