And this is it; an appropriate tome to close out my year of reading in 2020. Whether it was an effect of the pandemic or not, I have had a remarkable reading journey. I have ventured far out to space with Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, and Cixin Liu. I branched out of my comfort zone of the old English masters, and found new loves, like Nevil Shute and Yoko Ogawa. Early on, I read of our fate for the year in Albert Camus’ The Plague. I faced uncomfortable truths of war, crimes of my ancestors, in Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man. Then, I have been confronted to look at my white half’s biases in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. I drew strength from feminist voices of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, and Mieko Kawakami’s Breast and Eggs. I read of harrowing violence in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Perhaps my favourite experience, was going through a parallel universe created by the mixing of lore, physics, and love, in Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries.
My purpose – to search for answers that perhaps do not exist. My second attempt at Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, or my fifth read of Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge has not got me much closer…
“There are none,” my mother said, as she read too, to search the same. Now she reads for pleasure.
And so my 2020 ends it with Ahab at the helm. The unhinged madman out to get the White Whale. With the year that crushed the notion of planning, re-aliened our priorities; the year that forced our being content with what we have – I must say, I am envious of the book’s tempestuous tantrums. I am envious of the powerful Leviathan that thrashes his tail in destructive power, so to live.
Rave and rave away, Ahab says. Fight! agrees the Whale. This is the diabolic prose I want read at my death bed. Let life be wrung out of me with harpoons dug into my back. Let Time hunt me down. Let me drag Death along for a ride across the ocean. Let me live and live and live again. Now! Now! Now!
And so here is horoscope to start our new year, cast by the doubloon that was offered to the first man who spies the spout of Moby Dick, read out by Stubb, the Pequod’s second mate in humorous apathy to man’s fate:
Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter; and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or the Ram—lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull—he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins—that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path—he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! That’s our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales—happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! How we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! Here’s the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep.
This year will be one of passion. I am weary of polite. Of calm. Of Zen. This idea of quiet contentment achieved by quelling my inner storms. I have too much anger, too much love, too much feeling, for it to be always contained. I will have people dislike me – for that means I have stood my ground, unyielding to the pressure of polite. I will not forsake my time for social niceties. I will be kind and compassionate; but kind to myself as well, for I, too, am limited in time and patience.
And I will read – and writhe in anger, sob in desolation, laugh in hysteria, and be joyous.
Go ahead, call me a moody bitch.
I am the monomaniacal Ahab. I am the hunted Whale.
Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophecies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play — this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters around their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
‘Sail ho!’ cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
‘Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,’ cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. ‘That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. – Where away?’
‘Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!’
‘Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.’
JohannaAirth 