Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Herman Melville, Erskine Childers, and Motives

My nose, recently become bulbous, is now truncated at the Grindstone of Norton Critical Edition 3 of MOBY-DICK, but every day I put the NCE aside for a few moments and reread Childers's "The Letter" and reread the wonderful passage on the Gay Pursuit of a Perilous Quest. Right now I can't think of anyone who does peculiar ironic self-analyzing motivation as well as HM and EC. How Childers would have loved "Loomings"! I know very little about his life except his brave end. But he lets me laugh out loud a few minutes every day.

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