I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye.
(Herman Melville, _Moby-Dick; or, The Whale_, Chapter 28 "Ahab," <http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/moby/moby_028.html>) *****
***** The Great Wave Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan Christopher Benfey History - Japan | Random House | Hardcover | May 2003 | $25.95 | 0-375-50327-7
ABOUT THIS BOOK
When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to "Old Japan," with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an international power. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific.
In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit group of nineteenth-century travelers-connoisseurs, collectors, and scientists-who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving Old Japan. As Benfey writes, "A sense of urgency impelled them, for they were convinced-Darwinians that they were-that their quarry was on the verge of extinction."
These travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is "shadowed by hostile and mysterious Japan"; the historian Henry Adams and the artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an art-collecting trip and find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who marries a samurai's daughter and becomes Japan's preeminent spokesman in the West; Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb Mt. Fuji; Edward Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world's leading expert on both Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the astronomer Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and writes seminal works on Japanese culture before turning his restless attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo enthusiast) Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous Easterners come West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of Tea became a cult favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher of his time, who studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre.
Finally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity "seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril." . . .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Christopher Benfey teaches literature at Mount Holyoke College, where he is co-director of the Weissman Center for Leadership. Benfey is the author of Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others, The Double Life of Stephen Crane, and Degas in New Orleans. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.
<http://www.randomhouse.com/randomhouse/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=0375503277> *****
Christopher Benfey, _The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan_, Chapter 1 "The Floating World": <http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/excerpts/2003-05-20-great-wave_x.htm>
Christopher Benfey: <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/vista/0002/benfey.shtml>
***** New York Times December 6, 2003 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Tom Cruise, Bob Dylan, Commodore Perry By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY
AMHERST, Mass.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Commodore Matthew Perry's fabled "opening" of Japan. If you said, "Commodore who?" you wouldn't be alone. Commodore Perry - Matthew Calbraith Perry, to be exact - has faded from American memory, even though every Japanese school child knows his name.
In 1853, Perry brought a fleet of four heavily armed "Black Ships" into Edo Bay, near present-day Tokyo, and demanded, in the name of President Millard Fillmore, that Japan open its ports to American ships. Japan, which had been closed to foreigners for more than two centuries, complied, and Perry steamed home expecting a hero's welcome.
He was disappointed, for Washington had more pressing concerns than a tiny archipelago across the Pacific: namely, the extension of slavery into the West and the threatening noises about secession from Southern senators. Perry decided he needed public relations help. He asked Nathaniel Hawthorne, then United States consul in Liverpool, England, if he might consider writing a book about the opening of Japan, with Perry as hero.
Hawthorne was tempted. As he wrote in his journal on Dec. 28, 1854, "It would be a very desirable labor for a young literary man, or for that matter, an old one; for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme than Japan." But Hawthorne had other books on his mind, and suggested that Perry approach Herman Melville, who knew something about the Pacific. Perry, stupidly, decided to write the book himself, a wooden performance that did nothing to enhance his reputation.
. . . Japan took one look at Perry's steamships and cannons and decided to modernize the country - and quick. In the span of 50 years, Japan turned itself into an industrial power, learning watch-making from the Swiss and war-making from the Prussians, and won a place among the world powers in the ghastly battles of the Russo-Japanese War.
Yet some Japanese questioned whether this was progress. In "The Book of Tea," published in 1906, Kakuzo Okakura observed that the average Westerner was accustomed "to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields." . . .
Christopher Benfey, professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, is author of "The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/06/opinion/06BENF.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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