Glancing at the books, reaching for my handkerchief to rearrange the dust among them, I become, for a moment, the pale Usher, at the very beginning of MOBY-DICK: “. . . Threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.”
Musing for a moment, the dusty handkerchief in hand, my body relaxed, refreshed, waiting for something, I read that on a certain cruise away from Isabella, Columbus was constantly on duty, day and night, at one time going thirty-two days without sleep. He suddenly became ill, suffering a pestilential fever and a drowsiness or supreme stupor which totally deprived him of all his forces and senses, so that he was believed to be dying.
Melville, in a letter: “For my part, I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wideawake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible and sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long snooze together, under the sod . . .”
Musing, still, I think of islands, of the meaning of islands . . .
. . . of the Aegean, the Indes, and Polynesia . . .
and the endings in islands: Antillia disintegrating, perhaps, into the Indes, and Atlantis, into the Canaries, Azores and Cape Verdes . . .
There was Melville, an old man, 104 East Twenty-Sixth Street: withdrawn into family, books, and private publications: lonely as Hunilla on the Encantadas, the enchanted islands: insular on Manhattan . . .
and Columbus, back in Spain, in Valladolid, shunted from the Court, alone, crippled with gout . . .
(from the medical book:
called in the old days the “Disease of Diana,” because it afflicted hunters, gout is arthritic in type, resulting from imperfect excretion of uric acid. It occurs more often in spring and autumn—the seasons of change.
“The disturbance of uric acid metabolism causes an over-saturation of urates in the blood . . . Crystalline deposits formed will . . . act as centers for further precipitation of the over-saturated fluids.
In the bone-marrow below the endochondral junction, small deposits of urate crystals may be found . . .”
. . . the Indes, lost to Columbus now that they had become actual, were repossessed, precipitated once more from his imagination into the extremities of his body—the joints of his toes—as he had precipitated them before into the extremities of the known world: the islands, once more his, as crystals . . .