Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

insensible or absent being. It is characteristic of our time, and related to whatI was saying about the decline of our belief in authorities and essences, thatfew orators can be heard saying, “Oh, Commonwealth of Massachusetts,persevere!” and few poets now address the Evening or Sweet Days of Childhood.And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, amongwaves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture,Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrorsof his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousnessof his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water;for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, likeVirginia’s Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukesin the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out ofsight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping on the wing, the white seafowlslongingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left.There are some literary echoes in this passage, but they are drownedout by an influence that is not of the printed page. I find but one cadencewhich recalls the Bible: “suspended in exceeding rapture”; and but onereminiscence of Elizabethan, though not Shakespearean, blank verse: “Yetcalm, enticing calm, oh whale! thou glidest on, to all who for the first timeeye thee. …”Sir Thomas Browne is never far absent; he has had his part in theevocation of Europa, and in him Melville “fatally found that quietude butthe vesture of tornadoes.” To my ear, however, the movement of this passageis primarily oratorical.Yet the observation that this passage has the air of being written fordeclamation does not distinguish it as a work of the New World. De Quincey,Carlyle, Ruskin, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Kierkegaard had all beenwriting or were about to write prose that took its tone from forensic andpulpit eloquence. There are three elements in it, however, which indicatethat it is written in America:1. It contains a number of locutions which reveal the emergence ofthe American language.2. It is directed to a classless society—to Everybody.3. It constantly betrays what I have called a certain disconnection inthe American mind.200