Day 0050

I treated myself to the Parmigianino exhibition today, which was the main excuse I used to come to Paris in the first place. The pen and ink drawings were an unanticipated pleasure. Such a different style from the others I have been looking at recently -- he seems more than others to not change his technique too much between media, and makes sketchy, searching lines with the ink as if he were drawing with an erasable medium. Beautiful work, and lots to reflect on.

I took a tiny study of a tiny red chalk drawing of a young man he did. You get no sense of scale when you look at reproductions, which is another pleasure of seeing works in real life. Most of the images are far smaller than I had thought, which makes their delicate handling even more precious.

Finished Moby-Dick today. Wonderfully-paced, a perfect blend of a gripping yarn, allegory, philosophy and poetry. There is an oceanic inscrutability, a feeling of being confronted by a vast, unfathomable world that no matter how deeply you contemplate it you can never hope to understand or control it.

Despite devoting most of the book to what it means to be a whale and a whaler, despite giving a complete catalogue of whaleness, lingering over its habits and history, with pages and pages of anatomical, physiognomonical and mythological description, the leviathan remains just as profound and distant and terrifying as it was at the start.

Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.Herman Melville - Moby Dick

There's also the dual essence of man. Always conscious of it in museums and galleries. There's the rational pleasures of the mind contemplating the works of art and learning the history and enjoying the aesthetic, then there's the pulsing humanity that moves past and distracts you with its pretty girls never to be known. Feel, feel, feel! Forget the sculptures, follow the feelings! But I never do, and that's why there is so much escapism in reading about Captain Ahab, someone so utterly given over to his irrational animal side, plunged in to an all-consuming madness.

Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.Herman Melville - Moby Dick