Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

order to transform an old island language into a new continental one. And I proposedto show that this was not a recent effort but that the group of great writers whosemajor works appeared about a hundred years ago were deeply engaged in this task.In about a quarter of an hour I am going to examine with you oneof the most famous pages in American literature—the first direct view ofthe White Whale in Moby Dick. Our study of this page will not be primarilya literary one but an attempt to discover these American modes of seeingand feeling—characteristics born of a nation’s history and geography beforethey are characteristics of style. So first let us review some of these elementsof history and geography that had a part in forming the American.When I think of those who founded this country, I soon find myselfthinking of those who did not come. Of those who almost came. I think ofthose conversations in East Anglia, the Thames Valley, in Somersetshire—conversations which probably took place after dark and with long pausesbetween the exchanges:“Farmer Wilkins, will ye go with us?” “Brother Hawkins, will yeremove with us?”And the same questions were to be put in Dutch, in the Moraviandialect, in Gaelic. …Who came? Who didn’t come?It was not, for many years, a flight from persecution or from want. Atmost, for the first generations from England, it was a flight from the shadowof a persecution. And it was not until many generations afterward that thetravelers could be said to have come in the assurance that they would findan easier life.Those who came were a selection of a selection in Europe. But to saythat it was a selection is not to say that it was an elite. Here was the bigot,the fanatic, the dreamer, the utopian, the misfit, the adventurer, the criminal.By the middle of the eighteenth century, the phrase was already current:“He has skipped to America.”They all had one thing in common. Their sense of identity did notderive from their relation to their environment. The meaning which theirlives had for them was inner and individual. They did not need to be supported,framed, consoled, by the known, the habitual, the loved—by theancestral village, town, river, field, horizon; by family, kin, neighbors, churchand state; by the air, sky, and water that they knew. The independent.Independence is a momentum. Scarcely had the first settler made aclearing and founded a settlement than the more independent began push-188