Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

the matador sees the bull dashing toward him and at the same time, out ofthe corner of his eye, sees that a woman in the second row is wearing threered roses and that her black scarf is being fanned by the wind. The timelessis for a moment identified with the time of all those other people and thingsthat are not caught up in our crisis—the people who pass whistling happilyunder our hospital window, the people who are held up at a crossing whilewe drive to a burial–the birds, and the nuptials of Jupiter and Europa.Whereupon, after this far journey into the timeless, Melville bringsus back abruptly to the most concrete level of his story:On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that butonce leaving him,[The autograph manuscript of Moby Dick has been lost. I have nodoubt that Melville wrote “laving him” (washing him). After finishing thisnovel, something broke in Melville; he lost his concentration. Pierre and TheConfidence Man are on the level of “leaving.”]then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale shed offenticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who,namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had venturedto assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture oftornadoes.This is very extravagant writing, indeed, but, as the word “namelessly”shows, Melville is returning us for a moment to the symbolic level.We do not have to think of the Nantucket whalefishers as subject to throesof aesthetic transport. We may read:It is not surprising that some men have been mistaken by theapparently serene orderliness of God-in-Nature and, swept up intohubris, have attempted to blaspheme against it and to set themselvesup as its antagonists, only to discover that …Yet calm, enticing calm, oh whale! thou glidest on, to all who forthe first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way thoumay’st have bejuggled and destroyed before.The climax employs the most rhetorical—that is to say, the mostpotentially absurd—of all devices: the invocation to an abstraction, to an199