Not long after Carol and I moved from Boston to Evanston in 2006 I said one evening, “We are going to have to buy more bookshelves.” We had then as now two standing bookshelves each six feet high and two and a half feet wide. That is thirty feet of books, but I am a reader and they were full. However shortly thereafter I discovered ebooks and have seldom bought a paper book since. Only when there is something I really want to read that is not in a Kindle edition. I have owned several Kindles, but my present ereader of choice is my iPad mini. It has a color screen and can do more than a Kindle, including serve as a chartplotter. I have at least five hundred books in it and it takes up less space than one.
I think Carol and I are in agreement that when she retires and we move full time to Hilton Head almost everything in this apartment is going to be disposed of, one way or the other. So I went over the bookshelves a few days ago to see if there is anything here I want to read again before then and came up with a few books: BY A SLOW RIVER by Phillips Claudel; BIRDSONG by Sebastian Faulks; WARTIME WRITINGS by Antoine de Saint-Exupery; and I, JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER by Lawrence Williams.
I just finished reading WHISTLER, which is a novel written as though Whistler were writing his own autobiography. Whistler was a very witty man and the book is very entertaining. I googled afterwards and find that as I remembered it is mostly factually true to his life.
Two quotes from the book I particularly like:
‘And I, myself, made the statement, under oath in an English court of law, that I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, an agreeable lie, no more. All the really matters is that I was also born an artist. I later became a painter because, after all, an artist must do something.’
That was presumably made up by Mr. Williams, but this is from the transcript of Whistler’s libel suit against John Ruskin for libel after Ruskin’s comments about Whistler’s painting, ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold’, depicting fireworks over the Thames. The Attorney-General was Ruskin’s lead lawyer acting in a private capacity.
Attorney-General: Now, Mr. Whistler. Can you tell me how long it took you to knock off this nocturne?
Whistler: Well…to ‘knock off’ that nocturne…as I remember it, about a day.
Attorney-General: Only a day?
Whistler: Well, I won’t be positive. I may have still put a few more touches to it the next day if the painting were not dry. I had better say then that I was two days work on it.
Attorney-General: Oh, two days! The labor of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!
Whistler: No. I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.
(Applause.)
Whistler won his case. He was asking damages of £1,000. He was awarded one farthing. A farthing was one-quarter of a penny. The legal costs of the case bankrupted Whistler, and Ruskin, though insane, had great influence and no one bought Whistler’s paintings for many years.
This morning I came across Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ in THE SEASHELL ANTHOLOGY OF GREAT POETRY.
Somewhere long ago—perhaps in STORM PASSAGE, but I am not sure—I wrote of the two antithetical attitudes toward death of Socrates, who said, ‘Why should I fear death because when I am, death is not, and when death is, I am not.’ And Dylan Thomas’ words to his father, ‘Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.’
I in my old age am probably closer to Socrates than Thomas, or would like to be. I have said that I expect oblivion with equanimity though I am apprehensive about the probable pain in the process. However I doubt the animal in me, which has kept me alive many times when I could easily have died, is going to go quietly.
From what I read Dylan Thomas was a most disagreeable man, but he was a fine poet.
From Larry comes this link to what I called a re-imagining of the monastery of the sea. A ship for those who want to go to sea with 7,000 of their closest friends without ever having to see the sea or even know they are on it, a ship so huge it would make the TITANIC look like a tug boat. I know we are herd animals, but this is absurd. It even looks absurd.
Larry replied, ‘The monstrosity of the sea’.
Indeed.
https://www.royalcaribbeanblog.com/icon-of-the-seas
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