Micronesian Educator, Vol. 11 Island Education: Melville and the Masters of

MICRONESIAN EDUCATOR (2006) VOL. 11

Island Education: Melville and the Masters of the Typee School Christopher S. Schreiner, University of Guam

Abstract Although Herman Melville did not regard his earliest novel, Typee (1846), as his greatest achievement, it is possible to retrace, through close textual analysis and biographical research, the ontogenesis of a philosophical disposition in that novel, which reaches maturity in the metaphysical struggles and cosmic speculation depicted in the masterpiece , Moby-Dick (1851). The transpacific experience of cultural otherness in the Marquesas Islands that is the material from which Typee was created, found objective correlates in Melville's compulsion to theorize; his respect for leisure as integral to reflection; and his desire to uphold an ideal of nobility linked to uncompromising literary expression as the highest virtue. The resulting difficulties in his style invited the diffidence of an uncomprehending public readership. Melville's fond memories of the enchanted isles of his youth were as much of the happiness of open thought, which points beyond itself as if from a porch or ship deck, as of the tropical vistas and exoticism of tribal cultural practices. This type of thought bestowed dignity on Melville at the end of his career.

Keywords: transpacific; piazza; literariness; theory; philosophy; nobility

A Birthplace for Theory in the Pacific All great things occur away from glory and the marketplace ...

(Friedrich Nietzsche, 1961, p. 79) Herman Melville's youthful adventures of 1842 in the Marquesas Islands were long _ behind him in the last years of his life, before his death in New York in 1891. Yet they cast a giant shadow: he never recovered from his Pacific experience, which imbued his writings with an obscurity whose senses, if rigorously interpreted via select writings, reveals a learning outcome both philosophical and resilient. Much

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Schreiner - Island Education of great literature testifies to the impossibility of complete recovery, to traces and affects that linger, and owes its life to a struggle in which psychic recovery discovers its own impossibility in a redemption limited to artistic achievement.

Hence it could be argued by a biographical critic that said experience stigmatized Melville productively in excrescences of taciturnity and nostalgia, such as the condensed portrait masterpieces "John Marr" and "Daniel Orme." These are tales about seafarers that retire to land but never shed their nautical consciousness and tropical memories, wandering the land uncannily until death. Orme seems a "salt philosopher," an "interesting oddity," while Marr, alone on the prairie, dreams of phantom shipmates long vanished (Melville, 2004a). These beings are imprinted with seascapes, tattooed from within as it were with a stigma or brand, which at once separates them and preserves or safeguards their distance, their muted nobility, their singularity.'

It is noteworthy that this singularity does not necessarily mean uniqueness of specific details, but separateness or non-belonging. Nobility is separation-the "personal infinity" between beings according to Nietzsche.2 Sometimes suffering separates us from others, or an intensity of focus. The carpenter in Moby-Dick is singular and separate; he exists unto himself in his skillful but oddly impersonal bearing. His attitude, which some mistake as unfriendliness, is rather rapt absorption in his craft. This intensity of focus is precisely the carpenter's virtue as an old master.

Overall, the transpacific experiences of Melville's early years would from the start separate Melville from the bourgeois world he came from. The natural but foreign setting of Typee, the exotic, panoramic bay in which the young Tommo and his friend first disembark and escape ship to struggle with issues of identity and belonging, self and other, are the birthplace for metaphysical speculations that appear in Melville's later works, such as in "The Mast-Head" chapter of MobyDick. The endless aquatic vista glimpsed from the mast-head turns sailors into "absent -minded philosophers" who never catch whales, their cosmic ruminations making the ship profitless (Melville, 1992, p. 172).1t is as if a mood of primordial wonder was instilled forever in Melville himself by the islands and oceans and sky witnessed in his youth. In this regard the original experience we will speak of in the present study as "island education" is, for Melville, the birth of theory, and harks back to the nautical astrology of the earliest philosophers whose spirit appears in Melville's metaphysical yearning as it manifests itself in writings that take place on ship and shore (Zeller, 1980, p. 24).

A Lesson in the Semiotics of Nobility Tommo, the .narrator of Typee (1846) , flees his ship, an action that marks him as

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MICRONESIAN EDUCATOR (2006) VOL. 11 separate. He is already apart from his American homeland; now he is apart from his ship community. This double separation will be intensified by Melville's return, his so-called adjustment, and then in literary writing, that is, by the literariness of Melville's linguistic consciousness. Born an aristocrat, Melville would forsake his birthright for another nobility or high mindedness of thinking and writing.

This will have to be explained in greater detail below. The distance that early on becomes constitutive of the fundamental space of Melville's writing-distance from home, distance from others-attracts readers who buy the novel Typee as an element of exoticism. This distance will become so intensified by his stylistic and philosophical habits that it is no longer attractive but seemingly deranged, alienating the common reader.

What at once complicates Tommo's distinct, distant identity formation in Typee is the encounter with the gregarious community of the Typees, who embrace him.

They have a community that seems to function harmoniously without a visible government. This sort of culture must have impressed the young author, for it is one that is philosophically wise insofar as people seem to know how to rule themselves without complicated laws. Furthermore, the natives don't really assert their uniqueness, as Americans and Europeans are prone to do; instead the natives behave more or less the same, and seem happy doing so. The lesson of the happiness of not being an individual, especially a famous or ambitious one, unsettles and deconstructs the thought of this young man who is trying to assert his own individuality.

It is a lesson that will not die in Melville's work. Much later, Bartleby will be essentially featureless, neutral, a being unto himself. The "Fiddler," who appears in a short story of that name, will find joy and peace of mind in an unencumbered lifestyle in which he plays the fiddle, his previous life as a genius celebrity far behind him (Melville, 2004b, pp. 195-201).

In the novel Typee (Melville, 1996), Tommo is impressed by "the equality of condition manifested by the natives in general" (p. 185), and the nobility of the chief, Mehevi: "the greatest of the chiefs- the head of his clan- the sovereign of the valley" (p. 187). What strikes Tommo is that the "regal character" of the chief, his sovereignty, is carried "with an easy air of superiority" (p. 186).

Mehevi was in fact the greatest of the chiefs-the head of his clanthe sovereign of the valley; and the simplicity of the social institutions of the people could not have been more completely proved than by the fact, that after having been several weeks in the valley, and almost in daily intercourse with Mehevi, I should have remained until the time of the festival ignorant of his regal character. But a new light had broken in upon me. The Ti was the palace-and Mehevi the king.

(Melville, 1996, p. 187)

Schreiner - Island Education This light breaks in on the porch, the piazza, ofTi, where Tommo is invited to relax.

The sovereignty of the chief is manifested within the vista afforded by the piazza ofTi. The piazza is the perspective from where one looks out in one's recumbent posture, from within which Tommo experiences leisure as a fundamental element of Typee life. Tommo is impressed by the abundance of food and comforts that the Typee people enjoy in spite of their apparently unproductive lifestyle. People do fish, prepare foods, and build shelters, but they don't have factories or labor forces, nor money, and they seem happy and at ease.

Tommo is also impressed that the noble one, Mehevi, exudes his majesty in repose, not action. The "easy air" of the sovereign is redolent of leisure, relaxation. What kind of power is it that seems so passive? This noble power has not showcased itself; Tommo has only recently noticed it. The phenomenon of leisure, and its inner relation to a new form of sovereignty or nobility that is not directly associated with action and production, is one of the most enduring island lessons for Tommo, and for the young Melville.

The piazza of Ti will later be duplicated at Melville's farmhouse, Arrowhead, in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. When Melville first moves in, he observes that the one structural element missing from Arrowhead is a piazza, or porch, and he decides that one must be built. In the construction of a piazza we find a bridge to the experience of Typee, which left an archaic energy trace or affect in young Melville, who later exhibits metaphysical desire. What does it mean that Melville adds a porch to his farmhouse in the Berkshires? What does a porch do? It offers a space for reflection and for looking outward into the wider world. He builds his porch ten years after the publication of Typee, the novel wherein the piazza and its effect is first denoted. The porch as the staging area for metaphysical thought and artistic genesis will never be far from Melville's consciousness. Even at sea, the ship is but a movable porch in which consciousness is exposed, open to the elements and the profoundest enigmas of existence.

Tommo (Melville, 1996) is fascinated observing the "old masters of the Typee school" as he calls the tattoo artists. This term "old masters" will be used throughout Melville's career, and it strikes us as epitomizing the dignity towards which his profile moves as he enters his post-public career in Manhattan. There were many paintings of the old masters in Melville's house. Even in his youth he is aware of the old masters. It is an old master that is upset when Tommo refuses to be tatooed. "On my reiterated refusals the excited artists got half beside himself, and was overwhelmed with sorrow at losing so noble an opportunity of distinguishing himself in his profession" (p. 219). The old master, then, is the one who has distinguished himself in his profession. The tattooing wrought by the master frightens Tommo as a semiotic marking one as distinct from his own kind. He cannot yet accept such radical separation from his people back home, if it is initiated by others. In fact, Tommo refuses having tattoos inscribed on his

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MICRONESIAN EDUCATOR (2006) VOL. 11 face and arms by a tribal artist. For Tommo, tattoos would be a disfigurement that would take away his face, give him a face that would prevent his return to his countrymen. He has to preserve the face that will allow him to fit in. The visage ID. As in today's technologies, our face is our passport, and return to Tommo's homeland will be based on confirmation of sameness.

But doesn't Tommo desire to be different than his fellow crewmembers? Why not get lots of tattoos so everyone at home will be shocked? His resistance to tattooing appears to contradict Tommo's urge to separate himself from his own people. But it only reflects Melville's secret imperative to tattoo himself through his literariness. Melville does not want others to script or inscribe his separation; he will distinguish himself, stigmatize or mark himself, separate himself, through literature and philosophical thinking. The semiotic inscription of tattoos, whose local sense cannot go beyond the island, cannot be passively absorbed or inherited by the young Melville who likewise refused to directly inherit his own aristocracy in Albany. Rather, he has to create his own sign system, equally sovereign and obscure. Literature is an ennobling sign, semiotic, that will prove profitless. Of course the local semiotic remains absolutely obscure or opaque to Tommo. He doesn't know what all the tattoos signify. Likewise, later in his life, Melville's writing will be notoriously unreadable to all but a few readers (Renker, 1998, p.

117). As we will see, Melville disappears; the obscurity of his work removes him from the scene of popular literature, but in this removal his profile becomes ever more distinctive and dignified. His aristocratic bearing comes into its own, far from birth, in the approach of Melville's death, when he seems to be at farthest remove from the publishing world, when no one knows where he is. The aristocracy of Melville's birth had to be replaced with the aristocracy of letters, with an ideal of literary nobility. His radical democratic philosophy could not engage any other kind of aristocracy.

Melville tattoos himself with literature; his difficult writing becomes his brand, his stigma, his distinguishing set of marks or profile. He writes, he reads. At first he writes more than he reads. He says his education doesn't begin until about the age of 25, when he begins to read. Even so, his output is prodigious and he writes six novels by 1856. Although he learned on the islands the most deconstructive of lessons, that happiness is not necessarily linked to production, that the noble ones work less, think more, enjoy more, that greatness is not contingent upon action, he soon bums himself out writing for glory; he produces and produces, until he utterly fails, then stops writing novels. Yet the literature he has written has already ennobled his thought, and his living presence has objective value as an end in itself. We observe that thought ennobles itself as a higher law in Melville the forgotten writer, beyond practical value or the opinion of the reading public.

His egoism and ambition spent, Melville writes poetry at the end of his days, poetry in which, Heidegger says, thinking regains its dignity as a genuine activity

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Schreiner - Island Education divorced from technical determination and the marketplace. Poetry does , in language\.what thinking tries to do in philosophy but often falls short because of concepts and logic, that is , poetry responds to the call of being, asks questions, leaves meaning ambiguous but full of treasures. Poetry is pure theory, as was early philosophy before the rise of technical reason. "The poetical bring the true into the splendor of wliat Plato in the Phaedrus calls to ekphanestaton, that which shines forth most purely" (Heid~gger, 1977, p. 34).

A Lesson in Living with Failure Melville failed as a novelist and as a farmer. Back in the States after his youthful adventures in the Pacific, and with several novels already written, Melville tried to make a go of it at his beautiful farmhouse, Arrowhead, just south of Vermont in the Berkshires, where he wrote Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Piazza Tales. But Melville's farming was as profitless as his tremendous literary output at Arrowhead.

The novel Pierre, published right after Moby-Dick, made Melville $58.25.3 Hence he moved to New York, where he became employed as an outdoor customs official near the sea. As we have seen, Melville was always educated as much by outdoor thinking-on ships and islands-as by the books he loved. When scholars speak of an island in the context of Melville's career, they almost always mean "Typee," the fictional version of the Marquesas on which Melville based his first novel. But we don't want to overlook his time on the island of Manhattan forty years later, where Melville spent his final years as a recluse, a hermit or "sort of phantom" as literary theory likes to describe the author as such (Bennett & Royle, 2004, p.

5). But this is a phantom, we will see, with highly concrete habits and ethos, or manner of comporting itself.

The bookstore owner, Mr. Anderson, knew the elderly Mr. Melville was alive and well. Old Melville came to his shop on 99 Nassau Street, and the shop delivered books to Melville's house. Melville stood straight and often wore a "low-crowned hat" and blue suit; his physical stature and disposition struck witnesses as botb congenial and dignified. His granddaughter ~leanor recalled her many walks with him: "he made a brave and striking'figure as he walked erect, head thrown back, cane in hand ... dressed in a dark blue suit and a soft black felt hat" (Parker, 2002, p. 914).

One observer noted in 1891: "His proud and sensitive nature made him a recluse, and led him to bury himself from a world with which he had little in common ... So he was content to be forgotten, and among his cherished books he passed his life" (Parker, 2002, p. 917). 路 Unheard of and unseen, Melville

w~ . ...reading

and thinking and writing poetry on

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MICRONESIAN EDUCATOR (2006) VOL. 11 the island of Manhattan. He frequently took long walks for the purpose of reflection and natural observation, like the ancient philosophers. A critic who knew he was alive called Melville the "Socrates of Camden." After retiring from his twenty-year position as a customs officer, Melville often frequented book shops. He continued to educate himself, reading widely in literature, philosophy, nautical history. This insatiable passion for knowledge is as essential to our understanding of Melville's career as it is, for example, for an understanding of the diversely robust contents of Moby-Dick, whose eclecticism anticipates modernist experimentalism. To the wider world that knew Melville from his novels, he was dead. Indeed, he has stopped writing novels many years ago. The anecdotes are all there: no one could find Melville; Melville had, in the popular imagination, which could not fathom his deep novels, begun to die some time ago-around 1851 when Moby-Dick was published. Some say Pierre pitched everything decisively toward failure. Melville had been dying-disappearing from view--ever since. To write literary literature was a kind of death in the sense of becoming invisible to popular readership, to become unread until the 1920s when Melville would be rediscovered. The book to come, the author yet to be read-this is the "absence of the book," and of the author, Melville (Blanchot, 1999, p. 476).

Yet a few people did see Melville and provide us with their observations. It was said that Melville appeared to be six feet tall when he walked into a shop, although he was several inches shorter. Such is the testimony of Melville's granddaughter, Eleanor: Of Herman he [my father] once told me, "He came into the lobby to buy a cigar. He did it with a certain air. I did not know who he was, but he bought a cigar and walked out in a way that impressed me" -as much as to say, this simple act showed him to be no ordinary man. Perhaps it was partly the erect bearing and squared shoulders that imparted a dignity that seemed to add to his height. Many who knew him would have said he was six feet tall, whereas he was two or three inches short of that. (Parker, 2002: p. 824) Where did Melville get his height, all the more remarkable in light of his reputed failure? Writers are generally not educated in how to fail with dignity, how to live with failure, especially over a prolonged, unrelenting period of time-like the failure that Herman Melville experienced. There is no ethos accruing to a writer's identity that he or she gets from the community of writers, instructing them how to behave; each succeeds or fails in their own way. It was different, for example, for Homeric heroes, who, confronted with a terrible and perhaps fatal situation, could remind themselves they are noble and act accordingly. Bruno Snell's analysis of the Greek epics shows that, in a critical situation, Odysseus reminds himself that he is an aristocrat, and this guides his behavior as he conforms to the ethos, the virtue of those who are noble (Snell, 1982, p. 159). But writers don't have a group

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Schreiner - Island Education identity, or common ethos. A writer doesn't think, "Well, my books have failed, and in such cases, writers behave according to the code of conduct for writers ... " Melville, in particular, proves interesting to compare to Odysseus, because he was of aristocratic birth, from a good family in Albany, New York, but he rejected this sort of nobility of entitlement. Surely that is one reason he went to sea instead of college. Nevertheless he was committed to maintaining his height--his dignity and honor--in another mode and by other means than birthright or financial entitlement, and we want to see how he learned to do this. His task was to articulate for himself an interpretation of existence which would find distinction in his being unread and misunderstood, that would justify the twenty years he spent in the tedious career of a customs official. Let us recall that although Melville tried to write for a popular audience, he always also asserted his literariness, his complexity, and he did this deliberately, putting his work at a disadvantage. His stubbornness is embodied in Bartleby's refrain "I would prefer not to"-which路for Melville means, "I would prefer not to communicate transparently, but allegorically and philosophically." His obduracy is also demonstrated in the story, "I and My Chimney," in which a husband remains determined to save the ancient chimney, still extant in Arrowhead today, that his wife and others find obsolete and useless.

For this husband as for Melville, the chimney provides the site or infrastructure for armchair thinking, which for him does not have pejorative sense it has for pragmatically inclined Americans (Adorno, 1998, p. 130). Like the piazza, it is a condition for the possibility of the philosophical reflection that enables writing.

A Stranger to Glory Melville had to keep on living, raise a family, place bread on the table, in spite of his so-called failure as a writer. We can say so because the details of those years are more evident to us now that the second volume of Hershel Parker's monumental biography has been published (Nietzsche, 1961). From this site, from those last years a continuum can be traced back to Typee, the earliest novel of another island.

In its obscurity, singularity and distance this continuum is like a black hole which Melville entered over thirty years earlier and never escaped. But its silver lining, if one may speak this way of a black hole, was the objective dignity issuing from or associated with Melville's legacy of uncompromising literariness. He had the poise and hauteur of an elder artist, an old master who, while accomplished in his own terms, having lived by his own internal laws, had outgrown a desire for fame.

He was, in Maurice Blanchot's words, "a stranger to glory"(Blanchot, 1999, p.

453).

It is noteworthy that Mel ville read ever more philosophy in the years of his greatest decline in readership and personal obscurity, when he worked as a customs.official on the island of Manhattan, in New York, and after he retired from that 20-year

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Schreiner - Island Education

Philosophy as a Ruling Passion It was only Melville's celebrity that died, not his dignity. For many years, his production was driven by a desire for glory. But when glory did not come, poetic and philosophical thinking and not production became the event of dignity. Literature became the dignity of philosophical thought in acts of reading and thinking. The public uselessness of literature had to find an objective correlate in the thinking and walking life of the philosopher-poet. To repeat, Melville had become a man of leisure like the sovereign on the island ofTYpee. This is not a trivial development for Melville, but the unfolding of his destiny as a writer who always found it difficult to prostitute his spirit for profit. In the same way that writers do not, as an unspoken or unincorporated guild, learn a code that will instruct them how to survive failure, they do not have an intrinsic or institutional skill set for meeting the demands of a popular readership. This is hard for us to imagine today, when young writers follow corporate instructions how to best compose and market their product for market success.

Melville had finally quit his job as customs inspector, giving himself the leisure to read deeply in classic literature and philosophy. Thirty years after Typee he writes, "Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence. They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, ninetynine hundreds of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked" (VanWyck Brooks, 1947, p. 246).

In his late reading of Schopenhauer, Melville surely found the value of leisure reaffirmed after many years . Schopenhauer, ensconced in Europe, describes undisturbed leisure as a virtue of the greatest minds, a sign of nobility.It is associated with philosophy.5 Although Melville had, according to friends and observers, engaged in philosophical studies since the time of his "early manhood," this habit grew into a "ruling passion" as Melville became older until, as one observer said, "his conversation with friends became chiefly a philosophical monologue." It has even been said that "Mr. Melville's absorption in philosophical studies was quite as responsible as the failure of his later books for his cessation from literary productiveness" (Sealts, 1982, p. 213). We can surmise the following: that Melville took literary writing for a long time as a possible source of income, that is, as a useful activity; whereas philosophy, associated historically with leisure, with unproductive time, was never mistaken for anything but something absolutely impractical, which is why it came to be his primary activity in his retirement.

Philosophy is, for Melville, literature shorn of the illusion of utility, thought "freed from the curse of labor," to borrow an expression of Adorno, (Adorno, 1998, 134) and hence the most noble pursuit. The power of thought is encompassed by both loftiness and diving deep. Now, Pierre, who is a novelist in the novel

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MICRONESIAN EDUCATOR (2006) VOL. 11 named after him, is "gifted with loftiness" (P. 339), reminiscent of Aristotle's high-mindedness.6 Although diving deep in thought is the preferred activity of Pierre as he writes his book, so long as thinking is exposed to ambition and production, to the relative success or failure of the book he is composing in the marketplace, it cannot be but a frustration. It cannot possibly be judged on its merit alone, but according to popular taste and other contingencies of the moment. Only pure thought- as with Socrates, who did not write-would escape this wretched condition of an author either praised or condemned by the reading public.

A remark by Mrs. Melville gives us a glimpse of the way back to Typee, for she indicated that that Melville's reclusive behavior in New York was not due to the failure of his writings such as Pierre; he had since his Typee phase sought out a reclusive life, a life of leisure. It is noteworthy that she said that Melville joked about the awful public and critical reception Pierre (accused as he was of being insane). This is to say that his reclusion is not attributable to a trauma, a "direful mishap" like the missing leg that keeps Ahab hidden away onboard the Pequod (Melville, 1992, p. 506). Instead, his wife said, his seclusion from the bustling outer world was but the outcome of a naturally retiring disposition, and desire for repose after what would now-a-days be called the 'strenuous life' of his boyhood and youth and had long been his habit from the beginning of his home life years before Pierre was thought of.

(Sealts, 1982, pp. 215-216) Therefore we have to be careful to clarify exactly what sense leisure has for Melville as Tommo experiences it in Typee .It could have been a sign of aristocratic bearing, and hence reprehensible, if Melville had not found in it a sense amenable to creative genesis and the dignity of thought-that is, if he had not linked leisure to literature, literary experience, poetry, and philosophy.

Melville and the Resistance to Theory In conclusion, what can be said about Melville's island education? The remoteness of the Marquesas prefigures the romanticist stylistics of a writer that will stubbornly affirm the necessary difficulty and distance of genuine art, which plumbs the depths of thought and existence. Melville's mature style would seek to reflect the metaphysical desire of his protagonists, their thirst for philosophical speculation, as it would show their singularity in a world that does not correspond to their noble character or ethos. Melville's hero, Tommo, finds a model of personal nobility on Typee absolutely foreign to the aggressive model oflabor and production currently establishing itself in Europe and America, and an image of the artistic master who

Schreiner - Island Education has no profitable relation to the marketplace. But it would take Melville himself years to fully awaken to the truth of this alternative mode of existence or nich~ of being, in which he maintains his height as a failed novelist in the profitless, dignity-bestowing poetic and philosophical activities of his final days. These activities encompass theory, to which Melville's island experience gave birth in his own mind and artistry. Let us recall that centuries before the establishment of "theory" as an academic slogan, it meant theoria for Aristotle, the extreme antipode of practical knowledge, and represented the highest attainment of the spirit. Pure thought is the most sovereign element in the human being, the most majestic activity of intelligence, and the most exalted form of happiness. One thinks in leisure on the porch, or during walks in nature-even in the streets of Melville's New York. Plato says of the philosopher that "it is really only his body that sojourns in the city, while his thought, disdaining all such things as worthless, takes wings, as Pindar says, 'beyond the sky, beneath the earth,' searching the路 heavens and measuring the plains ... " (Vickers, 1988; p. 130). Aristotle says that the intensity of theory contains the divine spark which brings us closest to the Gods (Aristotle, 1962, p. 291). But this lead41 us to ask the folloWing question: are Melville's struggles and failure, his stubborn choice of a difficult style, his obscurity, not unlike the struggles of contemporary theorists like Derrida, who refuse demands of communicability that come from the common reader? Here again we have a so-called philosophical style, a style that, even when concrete, seeks to meet the demands of theory and not that of the popular audience which demands common sense. Melville's dismal reception by the public anticipates the resistance to theory manifested in the later failure of the literary theorists, whose style of criticism became too philosophical for popular taste (Schreiner, 2005).

Endnotes 1. - singularity 1. The condition or quality of being singular. 2. A trait marking one as distinct from others; peculiarity. 3. Something uncommon or unusual . 4.

A black hole. 5. Math. A point at which the derivative does not exist for a given function of a random variable but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists. [The American Heritage Dictionary, 2nc1 College Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982: p. 1143.]

2. - The phrase "personal infinity" comes from Nietzsche's reflections in The Gay Science on the distance of nobility. He speaks suggestively of the "human being apart who knows the sea, adventure, and the Orient. .. " See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1974: p. 234. For other remarks by Nietzsche linking nobility to distance, see the opening pages of Part Nine of the chapter "What is Noble" in Beyond Good

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MICRONESIAN EDUCATOR (2006) VOL. 11 and Evil, in Basic Writings, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House Modem Library Edition, 1968: p. 391.

3.- Typee, on the other hand made about $2000.00. For these and other income figures, see Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, Herman Melville A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Work. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001: pp. 163; 206.

4. - "Just before beginning work on his great novel [Moby-Dick], Melville set off on a four-month trip to Europe, where he encountered German metaphysics.

He read and discussed the work of the philosophers Kant and Hegel with the new friends he made. In England, France, and Germany he visited the great cathedrals and read works such as Rousseau's Confessions and Goethe's Autobiography."

Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, Herman Melville A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Work. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001: p. 124.

5. - See Arthur Schopenhauer, The Works of Schopenhauer, ed. Will Durant.

Trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1928. Of leisure he writes the following: "The man of inner wealth wants nothing from outside but the negative gift of undisturbed leisure; to develop and mature his intellectual faculties, that is, to enjoy his wealth; in short, he wants permission to be himself, his whole life long, every day and every hour ... The greatest minds of all ages have set the highest value upon undisturbed leisure, as worth exactly as much as the man himself. Happiness appears to consist in leisure, says Aristotle; and Diogenes Laertius reports that Socrates praised leisure as the fairest of all possessions. So, in the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle concludes that a life devoted to philosophy is the happiest" (384).

6. - According to Aristotle, high-mindedness is a noble attitude and the "crown of the virtues," imbuing every action with dignity. The high-minded person "will utterly despise honors conferred by ordinary people and on trivial grounds, for that is not what he deserves." See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Oswald. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962: p. 95.

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Aristotle. (1962),Nichomachean ethics. M. Oswald (Trans). Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, Bennett, A., & Royle, N. (2004). Introduction to literature, criticism, and theory (3nl eq.). Harlow, England: Pearson!Longman.

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Schrein~r -- Island Education Blanchot, M. (1999). The absence of the book. In The Blanchot Reader (Ed. George Quasha; Trans. L. Davis, P. Auster, & R. Lam~rton, p. 476). New York: Station Hill Press.

Blanchot, M. (1999). The power and the glory. In The Blanchot Reader (Ed. George Quasha; Trans. L. Davis, P. Auster, & R. Lamberton, p. 453). New York: Station Hill Press. 路 Brooks, VanWyck (1947). The times of Melville and Whitman. New York: EP Dutton.

Gado, F. (1983). The philosophical in literature. In J. Strelka (Ed.). Literary Criticism and philosophy (p. 203), University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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