With fairest flowers, whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele—
Thanksgiving update to Gay religions full of pomp and gold
on Herman Melville’s invention of the isolato:
They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.
Moby-Dick, Chapter 27, Knights and Squires
The house is old. Seventy years since, from the heart of the Hearth Stone Hills, they quarried the Kaaba, or Holy Stone, to which, each Thanksgiving, the social pilgrims used to come. So long ago, that, in digging for the foundation, the workmen used both spade and axe, fighting the troglodytes of those subterranean parts—sturdy roots of a sturdy wood, encamped upon what is now a long landslide of sleeping meadow, sloping away off from my poppy-bed. Of that knit wood, but one survivor stands—an elm, lonely through steadfastness.
Herman Melville: The Piazza, 1856
Image: Arrowhead.
The links:
- Bartleby the Isolato, 20 March 2007;
- Thanksgiving Day Celebrates A Massacre, 19 October 1990;
- The Piazza, May 1856;
- Arrowhead, 1860s.
