The Honor and Glory of Being Cold

(Rockwell Kent's print of The Spouter Inn, scene of much coziness.)

“We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of your much be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of the sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”

—Chapter 11: The Nightgown, Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville—

(obviously, but this sub-sub librarian does love to cite a source)

Despite an unfortunate run-in or two with frostbite, I love winter and the cold. To feel, with every breath, the sharp contrast between the cold air and the warmth of being alive is to become more aware of life. Some people go to yoga classes and meditation retreats to learn mindfulness. I go outside in winter.

Staring at winter stars while my eyeballs freeze is no small source of joy. There is the tremendous enormity against my fragile humanity, there is the whiplash of cold against the knowledge that I’ll be warm again soon. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. And beyond the “luxurious discomforts of the rich,” there is the luxurious comfort of being rich enough to choose to encounter a little cold, with the safety net that warmth is possible.

In Denmark, there is a cultural term “hygge,” that roughly translates to the idea of being cozy from the inside out. To be beside a fire, drinking hot beverages with a loved one, while the Danish winter darkens outside would be hygge. To run into an old friend in a surprising place would be hygge. I like to think of it as any time the “warm spark in the heart” is kindled, particularly in contrast with conditions—personal or external—that could be considered “an arctic crystal.”

The simplicity of the comfort at the Spouter Inn—just a couple of dudes cozying up for the night, swapping stories, with thin blankets and body heat and friendship their defense against the ice on the inside of the windows—seems even more delicious in contrast with where they go next.

Most of the time I have spent on boats has been in summer, and even then a geographically appropriate dampness pervaded everything. Whaling—even aside from the whale slaughter operations themselves—sounds incredibly uncomfortable. Sleeping on a ship, for three years at a stretch, sharing these close quarter with the same crew of increasingly odiferous gentlemen (I’ve heard that after a winter in a logging camp, the men had to cut their long underwear off because it had become glued to their bodies with a paste of sweat and dead skin and can’t imagine that whalers were much different than loggers in regards to personal hygiene) and all the while pitching and rolling on a creaking vessel through any and all possible weather, none of this is as rosy a picture as that of Ishmael and Queequeg being hygge in bed.

The pleasure, as Melville says, is in the contrast. A short blaze of comfort amid the discomfort or a reminder of discomfort in the midst of comfort staves of stagnation and boredom. In being aware of the contradictions and contrasts of every moment of life, I think we are closest to perfect happiness simply because of the imperfections. 

And, when the cold of New England winters starts to grate on my nerves, I think about this passage and begin, again to kindle my spark for all things against the arctic days.

Call Me Ishmael

(THANK GOD SOMEONE, specifically Herman Vaudeville, DID THIS!!!!! 

Although I'd be happy to film one myself, too.)

In the beginning, and in the end, there is Ishmael.

One of the pieces of Ishmael as the presumptive narrator of Moby-Dick—except when Melville himself becomes almost aggressively present on the page—that most interests me is to imagine the trajectory of a young grumpy possibly ex-schoolmaster and merchant seaman of Manhattan and/or New England to a tattooed adventuresome storytelling whale man. He starts as a lonely little man who is pissed off at the world, depressed and seeking at once the wildness of the sea and the companionship of a friend, and ends we do not know where.

Because I have felt that grim November in my soul when I do not feel I fit with the world around me, because I have sought escape and solace from that feeling in wild places and in the hearts of near-strangers, I feel somewhat obligated to love and defend Ishmael as a sort of sibling-traveler. Not that I don’t find him arrogant, prissy, pompous, and a guileless racist of his time and place—I do—but, perhaps even in those flaws there is as much resonance with me as there is in the rest of his character. It’s a bit like looking back at younger versions of yourself and wincing a little about all that earnestness, and no idea what rough seas would challenge and upend all one’s sophomoric certainties.

Ishmael becomes a man so thoroughly covered in tattoos that he has to save out special patches—in between the poetry he inks on himself—to record the measurements of a whale-skeleton temple in the Arsacides. He becomes a man at home telling stories in Peruvian bars with cavaliers and priests. He—conveniently for his author—has been present at all manner of strange whale sightings and taken careful—though not accurate to biology—measurements of baby sperm whales and all whale rib cages. He becomes a man up all night drinking in a stormy gam off the Patagonian coast with the crew of the Samuel Enderby of London. He becomes interesting—never mind his retelling Ahab’s final story, Ishmael’s own biography would be fascinating.

All of Ishmael’s scraps of adventure are a far cry from the man who would rather freeze on a bench in the barroom than share a bed at the Spouter-Inn with a stranger. Albeit, the stranger in question is a cannibal, but to imagine the life that Ishmael goes on to lead with broadened confidence and experience replacing his early, petty, anxieties that lead him to pretend to believe that a tortuously cold and narrow bench is better than the assured a warmth of an unknown is strangely sweet. I feel I know him.

Many of my friends and I spend our twenties roiled in self-involved crises and fits of pique. We would be naively and absolutely certain of things for a week, a month, maybe a year, and then evolve into something else. We were sponges for experience, and mostly were pretzel twisted with pretentious rationale for many of our actions. We had hopes higher than any mast and depressions deeper than any whale can dive, as it were. We were, many of us, Ishmaels—pre-Pequod.

And we were exhausting. To ourselves, certainly—turning thirty and putting much of that angsty confusion behind was like taking off the albatross. Probably more so to people around us, all waiting for us to grow up just a little bit, soften just the smallest fraction.

In getting to witness Ishmael uncurling from his priggish principles into a deeper man, I am reminded to not judge anyone as harshly as my younger self did. I am, we are all, still unfolding and unfinished.

I have scribbled in the margins a note about “those who come through the fire. Ishmael?” Because Ishmael is fictional, it’s pure and hopeful speculation that he becomes the sort of person I imagine—broad-minded, mellow, capable and flappable only by beauty—after his ordeal of sailing with the single-minded and selfishly obsessed Ahab, and all the other adventures that come after. I think that there is some crucial bit of grounding that comes from all the false starts and passionately pursued mistakes that we go through in forging ourselves. The fire, in my notes, I suppose is all of this—the often painful uncertainty of joining up with wildness and strange bedfellows and all things mad and unknown. In coming through the other side of all that searching—for oneself, whatever the maps and ships’ logs might say—there is peace.

Ishmael is, I choose to believe, like this. And so there is hope for all of us who resonate along the same sort of journey.