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An Introduction to the Blue
Humanities

An Introduction to the Blue Humanities is the frst textbook to explore the many
ways humans engage with water, utilizing literary, cultural, historical, and
theoretical connections and ecologies to introduce students to the history
and theory of water-centric thinking. Comprised of multinational texts
and materials, each chapter will provide readers with a range of primary
and secondary sources, ofering a fresh look at the major oceanic regions,
saltwater and freshwater geographies, and the physical properties of water
that characterize the Blue Humanities. Each chapter engages with carefully
chosen primary texts, including frequently taught works such as Herman
Melville’s Moby-Dick, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient
Mariner,” Homer’s Odyssey, and Luis Vaz de Camões’s Lusíads, to provide
the perfect pedagogy for students to develop an understanding of the Blue
Humanities chapter by chapter. Readers will gain insight into new trends
in intellectual culture and the enduring history of humans thinking with
and about water, ranging across the many coastlines of the World Ocean
to Pacifc clouds, Mediterranean lakes, Caribbean swamps, Arctic glaciers,
Southern Ocean rainstorms, Atlantic groundwater, and Indian Ocean rivers.
Providing new avenues for future thinking and investigation of the Blue
Humanities, this volume will be ideal for both undergraduate and graduate
courses engaging with the environmental humanities and oceanic literature.

Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York

City. His academic expertise includes environmental criticism, the blue
humanities, Shakespeare studies, early modern European poetry, and critical
theory. He has published fve single-author books, including most recently
Ocean (2020), Break Up the Anthropocene (2019), and Shipwreck Modernity
(2015). He has edited or co-edited six other volumes, published many
chapters and articles in scholarly journals and collections, and organized
exhibitions and symposia on blue humanities topics. His research has been
funded by the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Carter Brown
Library, the National Maritime Museum in London, and other institutions.
He received his Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2000.
An Introduction to the
Blue Humanities

Steve Mentz
Designed cover image: Steve Mentz
First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Steve Mentz
The right of Steve Mentz to be identifed as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and
explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-0-367-76369-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-76366-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-16666-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003166665
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For Alinor, Ian, and Olivia, who buoy me up
Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgements ix
Personal Preface: Bodies of Water xi

1 A Poetics of Planetary Water 1

2 Blue Humanities Thinking 17

3 Our Sea of Islands: Voyaging in the Pacifc 38

4 The Roaring South 54

5 The Human Sea: Networks in the Indian Ocean 65

6 Surrounded by Land: Mediterranean Examples 80

7 In the Caribbean 93

8 Northern Visions 107

9 The Tornadoed Atlantic 116

10 Conclusion: Touching Moisture 132

Works Cited 143

Essential Reading in the Blue Humanities 154
Index 157
Illustrations

2.1 “Pluralize the Anthropocene!” by Vanessa Daws 22

2.2 Blue Humanities Logo 23
3.1 Geometrical Projections of Two Thirds of the Sphere
(Pacifc Ocean Central) 38
3.2 “The Society Islands” 41
4.1 The Spilhaus Projection 56
Acknowledgements

First among many collaborators I call out the saltwater ecology of Short
Beach, Connecticut, including its sea birds, seaweed, menhaden, bluefsh,
oysters, and jellyfsh. We share a world, and I learn so much from immers-
ing myself in it. I recognize the unceded rights of the Totoket and Men-
unkatuck bands of the Quinnipiac people and their ancient stewardship of
the lands and waters that I inhabit.
I am grateful for the support of my colleagues and administration at St.
John’s University in Queens, New York. I completed this book as a Land-
haus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, and I thank the RCC
and its founder, Christof Mauch, for hospitality, generosity, and several very
generative questions.
It’s impossible to name all the scholars, artists, writers, and water-people
who have supported this book and the larger, fowing dream of a blue
humanities. Special gratitude goes to Stacy. Alaimo, Josiah Blackmore,
Hester Blum, Dan Brayton, Alexandra Campbell, Siobahn Carroll, Jefrey
Jerome Cohen, Margaret Cohen, Vanessa Daws, Bathsheba Demuth, Lowell,
Duckert, Marianna Dudley, John Eperjesi, Mary Fuller, Eileen Joy, Philip
Hoare, Jonathan Howard, Peter Hulme, Bernhard Klein, Astrida Neimanis,
Adam Nicolson, Nancy Nowacek, Serpil Opperman, Craig Santos Perez,
Laurence Publicover, Killian Quigley, Brian Russell Roberts, Martha Rojas,
James Seth, Dyani Johns Taf, Robert Sean Wilson, Marina Zurkow, and
many others. I am especially grateful to institution-builders who are crafting
spaces for blue thinking, including Nicholas Allen at the Humanities Insti-
tute of the University of Georgia, Ellen Arnold at the Norwegian Institute
for Research in the Environmental Humanities, Jonathan Bate at Arizona
State University, the Blue Humanities Lab at James Cook University in
Queensland, Cristina Brito and the 4-Oceans Project in Lisbon, Floriana
Cavello and the editors of Sirene in Italy, Joana Gaspar de Freitas and the
Dunes Project in Lisbon, Anna Iltnere and her visionary Sea Library in
Latvia, Ursula Kluwick and the Beach in the Long Twentieth Century Pro-
ject in Bern, Isaac Land and his fellow editors at Coastal Studies and Society,
Helen Rozwadowski at the Maritime Studies Program at the University of
x Acknowledgements
Connecticut, David Worthington and James Smith at the Coastal History
Network, and many others.
The pioneering ocean historian John Gillis died in 2021 when I was writ-
ing this book. I thank him for his example, his inspiration, and the generos-
ity that he showed to so many of the people whose scholarship appears in
these pages.
For hosting me to lecture about this project, I thank the University
of Bern, Kyung Hee University in Seoul, the Rachel Carson Center in
Munich, the 4-Oceans Project in Lisbon, the Norwegian Research School
in Environmental Humanities at Stavanger, the University of Bremen, and
Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.
Personal Preface: Bodies of Water

Twice each month, near the spring tides, I walk down the street to the low
point of Beckett Avenue and watch the ocean bubble up through the sewer
grate. Depending on when exactly I get there, and what direction the wind
is blowing, the water might be either a damp oval leaching out from the
sewer, or the entire street might be covered with around fve to ten cen-
timeters of water. The road does not get a lot of car trafc, and it usually
remains passable for dog walkers like me, except a few times a year during
storms or king tides. A slow exhalation of water passes through an under-
ground channel and up out of the grate onto the street, generating the wet
pulse of Short Beach, my little coastal neighborhood in the northeastern
United States. The water pools in predictable shapes, ftting itself into slight
gradations in the asphalt. It moves subtly in response to wind and the tides
that roll shoreward from the open water of Long Island Sound, maybe ten
meters away, on the other side of a row of beachfront houses. Sunny day
fooding appears only in this one place, a low point across the street from a
small public park. Here, at the bottom, the sea invades the land, following
the rhythm of the tides, twice each day.
Geographic invasion provides physical evidence, wet and salty, of the pres-
ence of sea in this ordinary Connecticut suburb. Other evidence is not far to
seek. A few hundred meters inland from the coast, a stub of the New Haven
electric trolley line follows a raised railroad bed through the salt marsh. Part
of the old “F” trolley route of the Connecticut Company that operated
between New Haven and Branford from 1900 through 1947, before the
postwar automobile boom displaced it, one last mile of functioning track
crosses the salt marsh about a block behind my house.1 As I walk along the
tracks, the tide’s infating lungs follow me, alternately flling and draining
the marsh. Living near Long Island Sound means that I see little appreciable
surf, but we average a tidal range of two to four meters each cycle.
During the warmer half of the year, I’m a daily high-tide swimmer, and
I carry the tidal rhythms in my body. Some days welcome me with afternoon
high tides, with plenty of time to swim after a full day’s work. But some
days I sneak in an early morning dip, or else wait until the water rolls up to
swimming depth when I should be cooking dinner for my family. I prefer
xii Personal Preface: Bodies of Water
a midday tide, but I like the cycle. I like tracing tidal changes through each
month. All year I watch the water crawl up and then recede, staining the
sand, flling the marsh, fooding the paved road.
That saltwater and salt marsh geography frames this book, much of
which has been written on the shoreline of Connecticut.2 Since the blue
humanities as an intellectual discourse has grown out of investigations of
how humans relate to the ocean, the saltwater flm of our planet, it makes
sense to begin here, at high tide, walking down the hill to see how much
the road has fooded. But my personal saltwater geography does not exhaust
the kinds of water with which this book engages. Even the whole World
Ocean—shallow and deep, polar and tropical—represents only most, not all,
of the water on our planet, and in this book.
Chasing multiple forms of planetary water, this book engages with two
bodies of water in each chapter, one large and salty and the other smaller
and fresh. Each chapter also takes up one physical property of water as a
substance—its polarity, currents, buoyancy, and other things—to explore
how this essential compound shapes human and nonhuman life. Each chap-
ter explores several primary water-texts, as well as splashing through a sin-
gle chapter from Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, perhaps the English
language’s greatest hymn to oceanic vastness and the human desires oceanic
vistas spur. These fve elements—salt water, fresh water, a physical property,
primary texts, and a chapter from Moby-Dick—comprise the backbone of
each of the ensuing chapters. (See Table 1 for all these elements together.)
These objects, texts, and properties describe the current state of intellectual,
creative, and artistic work in the blue humanities. They also, in their plu-
rality and messy overfows, provide a feeling of how this critical discourse
works. These ideas surge and reward immersion. As the American poet
Charles Olson rhapsodizes about boats and bodies in his experimental epic
The Maximus Poems, we must go “in! in! the bow-spirit, bird, the beak/in,
the bend is, in, goes in, the form.”3 For Olson-as-Maximus, as for many blue
humanities scholars who physically engage the waters they study, to go in
means to confront waters and their meanings not just with ideas but with
our bodies, sometimes in boats, always through direct contact.
Both the saltwater and freshwater bodies in this preface are my body.
Human bodies, like estuaries, mix up the fresh and the salt. The physical
property is the tides, in particular my local tides in Long Island Sound. But
since tides slosh around the planet’s surface in response to lunar gravity on
the World Ocean, they are your tides, too, wherever you are. Visible tides
are only easy to discern on oceans, or a few large lakes, but all bodies of
water respond to the moon’s pull. Even the water in my body, and yours,
shifts in micro-tidal patterns. In juxtaposing the water that makes up roughly
sixty percent of my own body with the forces that move vast basins of salt-
water across the surface of the planet, this preface aims to foreground the
interpretive challenge of multiple scales. Water surrounds us—in our bodies,
our neighborhoods, and our planet. The core intellectual challenge of the
Table 1 Introduction to the Blue Humanities

Chapter Saltwater Freshwater Property Primary Texts Moby-Dick

0 Preface Bodies of Water My Body My Body Tides Swimming a Long Way Together Wheelbarrow
1 Poetics of Planetary World Ocean Clouds Phases An Everywhere of Silver Brit
Water Song of Myself
2 Blue Humanities World Ocean Storm Condensation The Tempest The Quadrant
Thinking Praise Song for Oceania
3 Our Sea of Islands Pacifc Ocean Rain Buoyancy from unincorporated territory: [guma’] The Pacifc
4 The Roaring South Southern Ocean Wind Currents Rime of the Ancient Mariner Will the Whale Diminish?
5 The Connected Sea Indian Ocean Rivers Monsoon In An Antique Land The Grand Armada
The Lusiads
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
6 Surrounded by Land Mediterranean Sea Lakes and Connectivity The Odyssey Loomings
Springs Gun Island
Don Quixote
7 In the Caribbean Caribbean Sea Swamps Sweat A General History of the Pyrates Queequeg in his Cofn

Personal Preface: Bodies of Water

The Mermaid of Black Conch
8 Northern Visions Arctic Sea Sea Ice Fish The Seafarer Nantucket
Dark Trafc
9 The Tornadoed Atlantic Atlantic Ocean Humidity Polarity The Interesting Narrative The Whiteness of the
The Deep Whale
The Edge of the Sea
10 Conclusion Touching World Ocean Immersion Phases Swimming Memoirs Epilogue
Moisture

xiii
xiv Personal Preface: Bodies of Water
blue humanities explores how water functions in and across multiple scales.
How does the water that seeps out of a sewer grate at high tide connect to
the water that nourishes my muscles and fesh? How might either of these
two small bodies of water speak to the vast circulations of the ocean basins?
Gear-slipping shifts between inside and outside, salt and fresh, liquid, solid,
and vaporous represent interpretive puzzles. Making sense of disorienting
movements across scales and spaces captures the pleasure and ambition of
the blue humanities.
We who are swimmers, sailors, or simply humans who drink and wash
our bodies know the sensation of water on skin. The touch pleases, but it
also carries a hint of alienation, because land mammals cannot live in water.
The variable opposition between the wet and the dry has long been at
the heart of my thinking about blue environments. In Shipwreck Modernity
(2015), I explored “wet narratives [that] emphasize disorder, disorientation,
and rupture” in juxtaposition with “a dry countermovement that attempts
to make sense and meaning out of disaster.”4 The contrast between wet
swirl and dry structure operates as a fundamental division that animates blue
humanities thinking. The conceptual distinction between experience and
knowledge and the felt diference between feeling and form fow from the
contrast between the wet and the dry. To be wet—to be “in” (in Olson’s
emphatic word)—generates an experience and distinctive feelings. Drying is
the slower process, an imposition of form and accumulation of knowledge.
Even though the opposition may feel binary and abrupt—as cold water
shocks fesh on a hot day—these two states coexist in tension with each
other. The movement of water into and across bodies trickles through many
paths, forking often, sometimes unpredictably. The process through which
water moves between bodies—which Stacy Alaimo describes through her
term “transcorporality,” and as I have previously theorized in wetter con-
texts through the verb “seep”—resists any absolute distinction between wet
and dry tendencies.5 On the driest days our bodies remain full of water, as
does our planet even as both droughts and foods disrupt human communi-
ties. The felt opposition between wet immersion and dry terrestrial living
operates in tension with a broader sense in which water touches everything.
It fows through our body’s cells, moistens our food and fesh, permeates
the earth’s crust, and even, scientists have determined, sits frozen on inter-
stellar comets. The burden of the blue humanities follows water’s sinuous
trails wherever they fow and traces their dampness in our environments and
memories.
Writing, thinking, and creative work that fies the fag of the blue human-
ities responds to water’s intimate paradoxes in many modes, from poetry to
literary criticism to history, environmental writing, and religious scholar-
ship. This book’s second chapter, “Blue Humanities Thinking,” sketches
out a large but still partial list of the many publications, collaborative books,
special issues of journals, and related projects that have appeared in the frst
two decades of the twenty-frst century. Because of my own training, this
 Personal Preface: Bodies of Water xv
book leans heavily on literary texts and literary criticism, mostly but not
only written in English. Literary culture, as I present it here, aims to be less
a narrow specialization than a bridge-discourse to make water-infused ideas
accessible for thinkers in many modes. We all read stories, many of us read
poems, and the connective tissue of literary culture can, perhaps, form links
between disparate modes of analysis and argument. In emphasizing literary
studies, I do not mean to decenter the scholarship of historians, ecologists,
marine biologists, or many others from whom I have learned and continue
to learn so much. Rather, it is my hope that a nontechnical presentation
of literary texts, including canonical fgures such as William Shakespeare,
Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville as well as newer
oceanic voices such as Éduoard Glissant, Craig Santos Perez, and Monique
Rofey, can provide modes of access for many disciplines.
At the core of this understanding of literature as cultural bridge sits the
overdetermined fgure of the White Whale in Moby-Dick. Whenever I meet
someone who works with water in any way—a yachtsman, a marine biolo-
gist, a NASA scientist interested in the composition of water on extrater-
restrial bodies—Moby-Dick almost always sparks afnity. Readers of Melville
recognize that the book that contains multitudes—South Sea adventure,
cetacean natural history, Calvinist rage, political allegory, Shakespearean
pastiche, gay romance, and much more. A recent comprehensive literary-
critical study of maritime literature, A Poetic History of the Oceans: Literature
and Maritime Modernity by Søren Frank, uses Melville as a test case for mul-
tiple iterations of Western imaginations of the sea.6 For me, as for Frank,
Moby-Dick represents the urtext of the human encounter with the global
ocean. Rather than following Frank’s lead and orienting my study around a
core analysis of Melville, however, I dip briefy into fragments of Moby-Dick
in each chapter. I hope to spur readers back to Melville, as also to the other
primary texts, with newly blue vigor.
At the risk of making this short preface indulgently self-referential, its
primary literary text will be a poem that I wrote for a “Swimposium” event
that I was unable to attend in Dublin, Ireland, during the summer of 2021.
My poem takes its title from a durational art project organized and curated
by my friend and blue humanities inspiration, the open-water swimmer and
videographer Vanessa Daws. Her project explores the legacy of British long-
distance swimming pioneer Mercedes Gleitze, who in 1927 became the frst
woman to swim the English Channel. The title of Daws’s project, and my
poem, is “Swimming a Long Way Together”:

To be together, immersed in wetness,

In-splashing arms in rotation, to catch
The water, cup and hold, to pull endless
Flowing the sea backward and me to match
Leaping forward, through, in, past, and into
The deep blue. Free! I in the wonder-world
xvi Personal Preface: Bodies of Water
Circumperigrinate to rendezvous
Inside the world-sea, light-bender, dreamworld.
You are here inside too, swimming with me
For a long way. Can’t see where we’re going.
Arms churn circles and hands cup the salt sea,
Emptiness around, fowing, unknowing.
To school like fsh in silver mail so bright
From each day’s dawning straight on to the night.7

The poem, which I also recorded with a musical background for Daws’s
project, reimagines the solitary experience of ocean swimming as collective
act.8 It presents three fundamental features of blue humanities thinking that
can help introduce this book: physical contact with water, disorientation,
and the emergence of new collectivities. The story is hyperlocal and per-
sonal, based on the physical feeling of my body in salt water. Principles of
contact, disorientation, and collectivity operate across multiple scales. Blue
environments disorient and reform collectives on the levels of the com-
munity, the nation, and beyond to posthuman networks. They operate on
planetary scales, structuring the movements of human and nonhuman pop-
ulations. We start with the body.
It is not easy to capture in words the feeling of saltwater immersion.
This poem holds up the swimmer’s efort to “catch/The water, cup and
hold” (2–3), as I attempt to follow a long-ago swim coach’s advice to grab
the water in my cupped palm and pull it backward. Moving through water
entails multiple sliding forms exchanging places with each other, “Flowing
the sea backward and me to match/Leaping forward” (4–5). As my human
body pushes into the water in front of me, the sea swirls in behind to fll up
the vacated space. Liquid water always moves; it always responds to things
moving inside it. To feel oneself in this element, to move in a practiced way
that guides one’s body toward a desired goal—this feeling, and the form that
enables it, remakes a terrestrial animal. In the poem’s concluding couplet,
I present a desire to “school like fsh” (13). A fsh-school represents the
collective this book aspires to build, a school of blue knowledge. But expe-
rience always wriggles free. The prospect of fsh-being, becoming a water-
breather whose physical capacities exceed my own, brings me up against
the limits of my aquatic embrace. I love immersion, but I can’t live in water.
For the brief time that my body goes into a watery environment, my
capacity to orient myself in space changes. In the central word of the poem,
I feel “free!” (6) from gravity’s tug. The space I enter disorients me. “Inside
the world-sea, light-bender, dreamworld” (7), physical senses fail. Vision
becomes distorted. Sound and smell lose specifcity. Touch hypertrophies as
my skin vibrates to the surging passage of salt water on all sides. “Can’t see
where we’re going” (9), and since humans lack the echolocation capacities
of marine mammals, I swim with little guidance. Keeping a straight course is
a technical problem for open-water swimmers, though mostly an annoyance
 Personal Preface: Bodies of Water xvii
for meditative amateurs like me. I feel water around me water “fowing,
unknowing” (12). My experiential world narrows, distorts, and refocuses on
buoyancy and motion.
Daws’s “Swimming a Long Way Together” project includes multiple art
installations, public swims, flms, and conversations at diferent venues in
Ireland and the United Kingdom, following the itineraries of Mercedes
Gleitze.9 My poetic contribution, sent across the Atlantic in lieu of my body
in August 2021, builds toward a dream of collaboration. I want to shape
semiaquatic creatures into knowledge-building collectives. To construct that
unity over time, “From each day’s dawning straight on to the night” (14),
represents a difcult, perhaps impossible, task. Immersion creates communi-
ties, but when you’re in the water there’s a visceral solitude, a shock of being
a land mammal out of place in the world. Art, like swimming strokes and
intellectual discourses, builds communities through shared experiences. My
aim in this book is to provide for readers something resembling the immer-
sive communities that Vanessa Daws and other collaborators have been help-
ing me discover.
Maritime communities construct themselves through reading as well as
swimming. One clear example of community-formation appears early in
Moby-Dick, in the chapter “Wheelbarrow.” Ishmael and Queequeg’s short
voyage from the mainland to Nantucket, from which island they will embark
after the White Whale, provides a miniature allegory of how humans engage
with the sea. A foolish young greenhorn mocks the exotic South Sea
islander, gets himself tossed in the air for his trouble, and in the disorder the
maritime operations of the vessel fall to pieces. The captain, defending the
landlubber passenger, threatens Queequeg, distracting attention from “the
main-sail . . . [and] the weather-sheet,” which frees the “tremendous boom”
to sweep the deck. The greenhorn who had insulted Queequeg “was swept
overboard” instantly, and “all hands were in a panic.”10 In this moment, the
human–machine assemblage of a ship under sail falls apart: “Nothing was
done, and nothing seemed capable of being done” (63). Into this failure of
American seamanship Queequeg steps, frst as able sailor and next as power-
ful swimmer. He deftly secures the boom with a neat bit of rope work that
includes “finging the other end like a lasso.” Before the sailors lower a boat
to attempt a rescue, Queequeg “stripped to the waist, [and] darted from
the side with a long diving arc of a leap” (63). The man goes under, but
Queequeg dives to recover him, and swims him back to safety. “From that
hour,” Ishmael observes, “I clove to Queequeg, like a barnacle” (64). The
South Sea Aquaman shows himself the perfect sailor as well as a deep diver,
saving the sinking greenhorn. As sailor and swimmer, Queequeg establishes
himself as an ideal maritime human.
The reader’s adulation for the cannibal harpooner follows the narrator’s
lustful gaze. “Was there ever such unconsciousness?” (64) rhapsodizes Ish-
mael after Queequeg emerges from the sea, washes himself with fresh water,
and leans along the rail to smoke his pipe. His swimming body presents the
xviii Personal Preface: Bodies of Water
narrator and the reader with an erotic covering and uncovering through
repeated immersions, as Queequeg appears “throwing his long arms straight
out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders. through the
freezing foam” (63). The mystic marriage between Ishmael and Queequeg,
initiated earlier when they shared a bed at the Spouter-Inn, represents an
intermingling of human longings and oceanic intimacy. While the whale-
ship Pequod may, in its multiplicity and submission to a tyrant’s rage, alle-
gorize the antebellum United States, the bond between schoolmaster and
harpooner represents an ideal combination of Queequeg’s natural capacities
and Ishmael’s intellectual curiosity. As Ishmael watches Queequeg smoke
after saving both greenhorn and ship, he imagines the water-hero’s vision of
solidarity. “It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians,” Ishmael ven-
triloquizes Queequeg, “We cannibals must help these Christians” (64). The
contrast between the support Queequeg provides Ishmael and the raging
destruction to which Captain Ahab consigns his crew represents opposi-
tional versions of human solidarity in the oceanic encounter. Some mariners
seek domination and fnd destruction. Others practice immersion and man-
age to save at least one swimmer.
After this brief preface, An Introduction to the Blue Humanities continues
with two agenda-setting chapters: “A Poetics of Planetary Water” and “Blue
Humanities Thinking.” The frst explores the diverse physical shapes and
phases of water on our planet, in dialogue with nineteenth-century Ameri-
can sea poetry by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. The next chapter
provides a broad overview of the surge of critical publications, events, and
collaborations in this growing discourse over the frst two decades of the
twenty-frst century, while also articulating a contrast between Shakespeare’s
play The Tempest (1611) and new sea poetry by Craig Santos Perez. The
seven chapters that follow each engage with a body of salt water, from Pacifc
to Atlantic, as well as diferent freshwater reservoirs from lakes to swamps.
The blue geography that structures these chapters unfurls many varieties of
planetary waters, as my project aims to provide points of entry into the criti-
cal, creative, and activist impulses that characterize blue humanities thinking
today. A conclusion on the meditative poetics of swimming in the Anthro-
pocene rounds out the book with the hope of imagining possible futures
for human intimacy with water. As seas rise, glaciers melt, and warmer air
absorbs more moisture, the blue humanities will have much to say and do in
our changing ecological conditions.

Notes
1 For the local history as maintained by the Shoreline Trolley Museum in East Haven,
CT, see https://shorelinetrolley.org/about/local-history/. Accessed 5 October 2022.
2 During the fnal two months of writing, I was a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel
Carson Center in Munich, Germany. I am deeply grateful for the hospitality and
intellectual intensity of the Center.
3 Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 8.
 Personal Preface: Bodies of Water xix
4 Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 11.
5 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 2010); Steve Mentz, “Seep,” Veer Ecology: An Ecotheory
Companion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
6 Søren Frank, A Poetic History of the Oceans: Literature and Maritime Modernity (Leiden:
Brill Publishing, 2022). The Melville material comprises chapter 1.5, “The Four
World Pictures of Moby-Dick,” 146–71.
7 First published in Belfeld Literary Review 2 (Spring 2022), 198. The poem also
appears in Steve Mentz, Swim Poems (Massapequa: Ghostbird Press, 2022), 28.
8 The recording can be found on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-182078240/
swimming-a-long-way-together-poem-steve-mentz. Accessed 30 November 2022.
9 For more on this ongoing project, see www.swimmingalongwaytogether.com/.
Accessed 5 October 2022.
10 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, eds. (New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 63.
1 A Poetics of Planetary
Water

Scholarship in the blue humanities and related discourses during the early
decades of the twenty-frst century has been dazzled by oceanic vastness.1 As
Helen Rozwadowski eloquently frames the subject in Vast Expanses (2018),
her one-volume history of the ocean, the “world ocean” comprises “the
dominant feature of planet Earth.”2 The massive circulating systems that
connect all the saltwater basins on the surface of our planet have captured
the attention of scholars and thinkers in multiple felds. As ocean-focused
scholarly discourses have been developing, attention has radiated out from
oceans to include rivers, lakes, glaciers, and many other forms of water.3
The rapid growth of blue scholarship across literary studies, environmen-
tal history, anthropology, art, and related discourses has produced a riot of
intellectual plurality in the early twenty-frst century. As the seas rise, oce-
anic scholarship spills its bounds. These intellectual currents can be con-
ceptualized under the rubric of a “poetics of planetary water.” The fexible
and speculative nature of this concept enables it to speak across multiple
disciplines, geographies, and human histories. A focus on planetary water
responds to the global concerns of today’s ecocatastrophic times. The aims
of watery criticism, to adapt a phrase, include both describing the complex
workings of water and imagining ways to change our relationships to it.
While many neologisms have been proposed, from hydro-criticism to criti-
cal ocean studies to ocean history, the sub-disciplinary modes of cultural and
literary studies in the early 2020s mostly gather themselves together under
the banner of the “blue humanities.”4
The project of describing blue humanities scholarship in the frst decades
of the twenty-frst century embraces a wide range of academic writing,
artistic work, and activism on many continents. In presenting the outlines
of this discourse, I return to some foundational poetic texts for my local
watery environments, speaking as an American who lives on the north-
eastern coast of the United States. The two poetic fragments at the center
of this chapter, by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, represent inti-
mate encounters between human bodies and planetary water. They also,
not coincidentally, frame my own personal oceanic geography. Whitman’s
poem describes swimming of an Atlantic beach on Long Island or perhaps

DOI: 10.4324/9781003166665-1
2 A Poetics of Planetary Water
New Jersey. Dickinson draws on the Massachusetts coastline, just a bit up
the ragged edge of the continent to the northeast. My personal daily ocean
is in Connecticut, roughly midway between these two poets and poems.
I emphasize these specifc oceanic margins because of my commitment to
linking human-sized encounters to planetary forces. Bringing a taste of my
local Atlantic into a global scholarly conversation will keep these thoughts
tangible, even though the poetics operates across planet-sized, human-sized,
and other scales. Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poems operate as exemplary
texts in dialogue with scholarship from a variety of water-thinkers. To dis-
play the multimodal nature of blue humanities work, I turn near the end
of this chapter to a recent book by an English nature writer to help con-
sider relationships among diferent locations, modes of thinking, and human
encounters with water. The blue humanities, as I pursue it, combines liter-
ary, historical, and critical modes.
In moving beyond oceans, blue humanities scholarship follows an impulse
that has long been present in oceanic writing. Spillover appears in our
urtext, Moby-Dick. One of the most widely quoted phrases from the novel
holds that “meditation and water are wedded for ever.”5 This phrase, how-
ever, does not exclusively describe the salt sea that is the novel’s primary
setting. It instead emerges from Ishmael’s contemplation of desert wells, the
Hudson estuary, and the god-infused springs of Greek myth. The ocean
itself generally appears as a fgure of excess and food. For example, in “Brit,”
Ishmael describes the ocean as rebellious: “Panting and snorting like a mad
battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe”
(224). This sentence, one of many in which the narrator rhapsodizes oce-
anic excess, emphasizes how the great waters “overrun” all boundaries. The
ongoing shift in blue humanities scholarship from a largely saltwater and
liquid focus to more varied analyses of planetary water extends this expan-
sive impulse beyond the ocean itself. To surge over boundaries and encircle
the globe require us to embrace not only each bay and basin but also smaller
bodies of fresh water, as well as solid ice and water vapor. A poetics of plan-
etary water does not so much turn its back on the sea as follow ocean-logic
to its logical conclusions.
The term “poetics” captures the dynamism of blue humanities thinking
because in English it resembles both a singular and plural noun. As I employ
it, poetics functions as a singular concept: a poetics of planetary water aims
to clarify the relationships between humans and water in all its forms and
phases. In a similar vein, I treat the blue humanities as a singular collec-
tive: the blue humanities combines water with human ideas. The Oxford
English Dictionary observes that the English word “poetics” has taken both
singular and plural verbs in historical usage. The central meaning for my
purposes defnes poetics as a “theory of form” (1b). This defnition usually
takes a singular verb, though hints of plurality cling to the concept. My use
of the term “poetics” echoes Aristotle’s descriptive approach in his Poetics
(330 BCE), in which the philosopher describes what poetry is by observing
 A Poetics of Planetary Water 3
the examples he has to hand. The key term for Aristotle, and also for me,
is mimesis, or “modes of imitation.”6 Aristotle builds his structures out of
his reading of Homer and Greek drama, while blue humanities scholarship
splashes around with a wetter range of exemplary texts. Aristotle’s claim that
poetics combines pleasure and pain seems noteworthy for a focus on watery
parts of the world that allure and threaten human bodies. Aristotle empha-
sizes the pleasure of representing something that can be painful: “though
the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most
realistic representations of them” (227). The pleasure that emerges from the
threat of pain represents an important element in blue aesthetics. A blue
poetics always engages with the awkward ft between humans and water; we
depend upon it and love it, but it cannot be our home. The human–water
relationship occupies the realm Aristotle names “poetics” in that it is distinct
from the human world that he theorizes as politics, or the science of the
polis. “There is not the same kind of correctness in poetry,” the philosopher
writes, “as in politics” (260). The pleasure–pain of poetic order instead asks
humans to touch and engage more-than-human-beings and systems. My
aim is to construct a poetics of planetary water that employs the fexibility
and dynamism of the term “poetics.”

Three Phases of Planetary Water

Cultural analysis of the multiphasic nature of the human encounter with
water can begin with a famous phrase from Evangelista Torricelli. The six-
teenth-century Italian humanist and scientist, inventor of the barometer,
once remarked that humans live “at the bottom of a vast sea of air.”7 Torri-
celli accurately described the surface of our planet as covered by two bodies:
a heavy and liquid one above which humans usually stand, and a lighter
gaseous one to the bottom of which we generally sink. Alongside these
two oceans, we should also add the global presence of ice, sometimes called
the cryosphere. In our current interglacial period, the ice-ocean has been
fragmented into large ice caps near the poles, including those on Antarc-
tica and Greenland, and high-altitude glaciers. Blue humanities scholarship
tends to oscillate between rigorous materiality and attention to detail and
more expansive or poetic ideas.8 For literary writers and scholars, the ocean
seems especially attractive because of its metaphorical vastness. The great
waters represent a principle of narrative fecundity that Salman Rushdie has
described as the “sea of stories.”9 The ocean, in Rushdie’s formulation, con-
structs an allegory for literary history and literary culture on a global, con-
nected scale.
But that ocean is not all the water that humans encounter. Above the
ocean, clouds circulate as ephemeral fragments of water vapor and water
droplets. The sea of air contains massive amounts of water—roughly 142 mil-
lion-billion liters—but that vapor hangs mostly unseen, occasionally form-
ing into the visible patterns of clouds. While much could be said about the
4 A Poetics of Planetary Water
poetics of humidity, clouds present the most visible images of water vapor
in the atmosphere.10 I take my cue from a famous exchange in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet. The prince, in mockery and in jest, attempts to interpret clouds.
“Do you see yonder cloud,” he says to the counselor Polonius, “that’s almost
in shape of a camel?” (3.2.367–68).11 His interlocutor, good subject to the
royal throne, concurs: “By th’ mass and ‘tis like a camel indeed” (3.2.369).
The counselor goes on to agree, as Hamlet’s mind changes, that the cloud
is “backed like a weasel” (3.2.371) and “very like a whale” (3.2.373). The
joke that camels are unlike weasels are unlike whales obscures the more
complex interpretive issue. The hybridization that Polonius accomplishes as
cloud-reader, in which he starts with an initial identifcation, camel, then
bends it into two new forms, weasel and whale, essentially follows a hybrid-
izing theory of interpreting forms of water. Clouds appear as many diferent
things to prince and advisor. Hamlet and Polonius may only be pretending
to read cloud shapes—the scene takes place indoors and at night, though
perhaps the playwright is imagining outdoor views from the open-air Globe
Theater—but the dialogue implies a theory of how vaporous forms assume
multiple meanings. The prince’s eforts to appear smarter than the old man
he will murder in their next scene together do not fully cut through the
interpretive problems that clouds pose. Hamlet’s building aggression toward
Polonius does, however, obscure the imaginative fexibility of the older
man. Clouds are camels, weasels, whales, and other shapes. The challenge is
devising a language to understand their forms.
Often with reference to this passage in Hamlet, clouds are sometimes
taken to represent a prototypical problem for hermeneutics. John Durham
Peters, in his book The Marvelous Clouds (2015), notes that “clouds are often
thought of as the thing par excellence without inherent meaning.”12 Peters
further suggests that clouds represent “a crucial step in the prehistory of
recording media” (259), and he notes that they “resist ontology” (260).
Lorraine Daston, in a 2016 analysis of nineteenth-century scientifc and
artistic eforts to categorize cloud shapes, suggests that the project demon-
strates the limits of categorization itself. “All classifcation,” she observes,
“depends on some degree of abstraction from the blooming, buzzing world
of particulars.”13 Clouds, she continues, challenge all projects of classifying
nature. Bringing clouds, as Daston describes the process, from “Ovidian fu-
idity to Linnaean fxity” (48) represents a key task of the cloud atlas-makers
she explores. She posits a structural opposition between the Enlightenment
scientist and the classical poet. Ovid, unlike Linnaeus, invites a poetic inter-
pretive frame. Combining Daston’s exploration of scientifc practices with
Peters’s media analysis suggests that the connection in Hamlet between Polo-
nius as naïve cloud-gazer and Polonius as goofy theorist of media forms
is not accidental. Neither static nor visible in the same aspect over time,
clouds coalesce into forms briefy, fragmentarily, impermanently. Mobile
water-in-air structures present all form and no substance, no clear lines of
descent or connection but a tantalizing possibility of partial repetition over
 A Poetics of Planetary Water 5
time. The critical water-thinker’s task distinguishes itself from the cataloging
projects of nineteenth-century cloud morphologies. The project today asks
us to assimilate feeting clouds to robust if still dynamic forms.
The third, and for many humans the rarest, form of planetary water com-
prises the ice-ocean or cryosphere. Ice is the least mobile phase of planetary
water, but as explorers and writers from John Davis to John Muir to Barry
Lopez have emphasized, glacial ice feels alive.14 The paradoxical qualities of
living ice have motivated blue humanities scholarship on the polar regions.
Hester Blum has recently noted, in scholarship informed by her personal
voyages to ice-flled latitudes, “Ice in the Arctic and Antarctic appears both
silent and still and yet is spectacularly on the move, and not just in epochs
of climate crisis: in its vibrance ice carves valleys, levels mountains, and
deposits moraines over hundreds of miles.”15 In an ecocritical analysis of
early modern Arctic narratives, Lowell Duckert asserts that the “ice age is
never over.”16 Christopher Heuer’s art historical study Into the White: The
Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image (2019) describes the recovery of
a frozen cache of engravings from the doomed expedition of Willem Bar-
ents to Novaya Zemlya in 1596–97 as representing the “frozen words” of
premodern explorers.17 These and other writers about planetary ice, from
adventure writers such as Bill Streever to Indigenous activists such as Sheila
Watt-Cloutier, demonstrate that the ice-ocean is as dynamic and humanly
present as the liquid and vaporous oceans, even if ice is not very accessible
for the human populations that live in temperate and tropical regions.18
Even as this chapter’s two poetic texts lure me back toward human-scaled
beach scenes, the blue humanities project keeps all these disparate world-
seas in mind. The goal is an interpretive method that embraces all three
phases of planetary water. Poetry and poetics seem powerful tools because
poems originate in and are directed to individual humans while also imagin-
ing vaster scales. The pressure of human-sized encounters generates mobile
reminders that water permeates our planetary existence across multiple con-
texts. Roughly seventy percent of the planet’s surface is covered by liquid
and solid water, human bodies are composed of approximately sixty percent
liquid water, and the vast gaseous atmosphere contains around four percent
water vapor. Human bodies and cultures form themselves in encounters
with water in all three phases: liquid, solid, and gas. Water is, in fact, the
only substance commonly present in all three phases though, by applying
heat and pressure, all compounds can be liquefed or boiled.
Multiple forms of planetary water can be integrated into what James
Smith and I recently called an inclusive blue humanities.19 While my co-
author and I used the term to indicate openness to multiple human cultures,
I am also committed to exploring how multiple forms of water shape human
bodies and human histories. Diferent narratives become legible through
depictions of liquid salt water and fresh water, gaseous vapor, and solid ice.20
The globe-embracing ocean of stories contains and constrains the circula-
tion of literary narratives, texts, cultures, and traditions. Above the great
6 A Poetics of Planetary Water
waters, invisible but circulating, the semitranslucent sea of air overfows with
ephemeral fragments, forms without substance, lacking clear lines of descent
but hanging heavy in the air like fog. To reconcile these forms of circula-
tion into a fexible and interwoven theory of planetary water as subject and
shaper of human culture remains an unfnished task of twenty-frst century
ecocritical literary studies.

The Example of John Gillis: “The Blue Humanities” (2013)

In introducing the recent history of blue humanities scholarship, I begin
with the works of the late ocean historian John Gillis, who died at the end
of 2021 in California. The fnal decades of Gillis’s career saw him publish
two infuential books in maritime environmental history: Islands of the Mind:
How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (2004) and The Human
Shore: Seacoasts in History (2012). For this book, however, I start with a short
open-access essay he wrote for the online magazine of the National Endow-
ment of the Humanities in 2013 entitled “The Blue Humanities.”21 The
oceanic turn in historical and literary scholarship was already very much
underway by that time, in part through Gillis’s own eforts, and I had been
testing the terms “blue humanities” or “blue cultural studies” in publications
since around 2009.22 In a generous summation, Gillis’s short article contex-
tualizes the “cultural turn to the sea” as part of a trend he calls the “historici-
zation of the oceans.” Drawing on disciplines from archeology, anthropology,
maritime history, biology, and environmental history, as well as on poetry,
painting, narrative fction, and other arts, Gillis frames human cultural his-
tory around a series of discoveries of new oceans, including the ffteenth-
century discovery by European mariners of transoceanic trade routes and
the subsequent fctional discoveries of writers such as Melville, Richard
Henry Dana, Daniel Defoe, and others. Beyond a focus on Romantic and
modern ideas about the sea, which he reads as being intertwined with the
progressive alienation of industrial societies from any “working knowledge
of the sea,” Gillis treats the great waters as a resource for the imagination.
Engaging with literary critic Margaret Cohen’s ideas about the “sublima-
tion of the sea,” Gillis puts forward a paradoxical dual motion.23 As the sea
recedes from the everyday working life of nonprofessional sailors, it grows
more and more central to the cultural imagination. “We have come to know
the sea,” he concludes, “as much through the humanities as through sci-
ence.” Artistic, poetic, and humanistic knowledge, he insists, defne the sea’s
centrality to modern Western culture.
I frst read this article in 2013, two years after meeting Gillis at a confer-
ence and later visiting him on the remote island on the Maine coast where
he often spent the summer months. I remember feeling particularly pleased
that he cited me as the coiner of the phrase “blue humanities,” because read-
ing my name in his article refected my ideas back to me in the way that a
reader’s response can convince a writer that our thinking is not happening
 A Poetics of Planetary Water 7
in isolation. The animating idea of Gillis’s article, that in returning to the
ocean “we are returning to our beginnings,” seems both demonstrably true
and a partial defection of the challenges of the environmental present. Since
the early 2010s I have been phrasing the project a bit diferently. The reason
to study the water, as I would phrase the point now, is that we are going
to be seeing more of it, closer, in the near future. Rising sea levels and
high-intensity rainstorms are making our environment wetter. Higher tem-
peratures produce heavier rains since warm air holds more moisture. I have
witnessed disorientingly tropical rainstorms in my nontropical neighbor-
hood in Connecticut. In high elevation areas, glacial melt and retreat are
fracturing long-established waterscapes. Global climate change defnes the
central challenge of the current generation, and scholarship about water in
all its forms will be necessary to make sense of our disrupted ecosystems.
The changes in planetary water emerging from climate instability are
not best represented by polar bears or the threatened Thwaites Glacier in
Antarctica. Water-changes appear intimately and tangibly. We feel them on
our skin. A closing detail in Gillis’s “Blue Humanities” essay takes up the
heroic case of Rachel Carson, perhaps the greatest American writer about
the sea during the twentieth century. Carson, who like Gillis spent much of
her professional life on the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, focused
her scientifc and poetic attention on tide pools and beaches, as well as writ-
ing powerfully about the ecosystems of the deep oceans. Gillis notes, how-
ever, that she “never really learned to swim.” For an everyday swimmer like
me whose understanding of water is inseparable from immersing my body
in oceans, pools, rivers, and lakes, I fnd that shocking. How would it feel to
be Carson, gifted with a poet’s eye and a biologist’s training, while also being
excluded from water’s embrace? What insights are available from the beach?
To explore that question, I turn now to Emily Dickinson.

“An Everywhere of Silver”

There may be no more fnely observed portrait of the beach than Emily
Dickinson’s tiny lyric poem “An Everywhere of Silver.” Written in 1865,
the fnal year of the American Civil War, this poem miniaturizes the confict
of sea and land into an aesthetic of barely contained rupture. In Dickinson’s
framing, we stand on sand facing an alien sea:

An Everywhere of Silver,
With Ropes of Sand
To keep it from efacing
The Track called Land.24

The poem structures itself through three echoing lines, each of which has
two strong stresses and two capitalized nouns. The frst line features Eve-
rywhere of Silver, the second Ropes of Sand, the fourth the Track called
8 A Poetics of Planetary Water
Land. These three repetitive lines encircle the weakly stressed and uncapital-
ized third line, with its central verb “efacing.” The action of efacing, which
the poem both presents and disavows, communicates the vulnerability of
sand and land to watery incursion. The Silver does not eface the Land in
this poem, but we all know what high tides do to marks upon the strand.
Dickinson may well be thinking of Edmund Spenser’s famous Elizabethan
sonnet “One day I wrote her name upon the strand,” but the association of
the beach with impermanence was and remains familiar.25 As so often in
Dickinson’s poetry, the tiny space of this poem captures objects in motion,
the silver ocean spreading itself “Everywhere,” the Sand twisted into Ropes,
the Land humanized into Tracks. Our bodies do not get wet, as they do in
some of her other sea poems. The waterline conjures an alien space, a lure,
and a temptation. Its surges will not eface the dry worlds on which humans
walk, and yet we cannot help being drawn, perhaps by ropes of sand, toward
the water. The sea-silver the poet presents feels like a cloud when you walk
through it on an alpine hike—soft, wet, intangible, insistently present. Like
Hamlet’s camel-weasel-whale clouds, Dickinson’s poem assumes new forms
as we observe it. The lyric exercises our capacity to think about our envi-
ronment in multiple forms, a valuable technique for the blue humanities and
other environmental critical modes.
Reading Dickinson’s poetry in the context of ecological crisis has led the
literary ecocritic Anne-Lise Francois, in her essay “Ungiving Time: Reading
Lyric by the Light of the Anthropocene,” to assert that the tensile instability
of lyric makes these poems especially well-suited to environmental shifts in
scale. “In the suddenness with which they can shift gears without it feeling
like a shock,” she writes, “poems can help make palpable the contradictions
of the simultaneously slow and fast times of the Anthropocene.”26 Francois
demonstrates that Dickinson’s intricate formal tensions and releases, the ani-
mating music of her lines, move her poetry in ecological directions. I extend
Francois’s reading in a watery context by suggesting that the “Everywhere”
of the nonhuman sea bears a distinctive environmental meaning for the poet.
Salt water overwrites beaches and human bodies. Watery “Silver” leaves us
no dry place for our feet. But the formal pressure within the poetry, which
Francois defnes as “those delicate practices of transmission inseparable from
the work of release and abandonment” (256), creates the poem itself as a
beach of partial legibility, a blankness onto which human meaning can, for a
time, make marks. Poems thus enable two slightly opposed human responses
to rising seas and watery overfows: we accommodate ourselves to inevitable
efacements, and we align ourselves to the Ropes and Tracks that, for now,
keep us on human courses. In a sense, Dickinson’s beach is a cloud—one
that has not yet rained down on us.
Standing at the water’s edge every year in late spring, I murmur Dickinson’s
sea poems to myself. Each year, I recite “An Everywhere of Silver” or the
more famous “Exultation is the going” to myself before my frst swim of
the season. I know no more inspiring environmental art than Dickinson’s
 A Poetics of Planetary Water 9
poems. Her lines bring my body back into the cold water from which I have
been excluded over a long winter. With my toes on wet sand, I think of
Rachel Carson, who knew so much and wrote so insightfully but did not
swim. I also think of my departed friend John Gillis. And into that silver
Everywhere I plunge my body, shudder with cold, and meditate on how to
endure in inhospitable environments. To support both physical experiences
and thinking, poetry helps.

Theoretical Legacies: Islands and Shores

The scholarly work of John Gillis that most infuences the blue humanities
appeared primarily in the books Islands of the Mind and The Human Shore.
These wide-ranging global histories have been especially inspiring because
of the eforts Gillis makes to focus on the imagination. He notes early in
Islands of the Mind that the condition he explores, “isolomania” or obses-
sion with islands, represents “in its many diferent guises a central feature
of Western culture.”27 He draws ideas about islands and oceans from many
sources, but it seems revealing that the frst two quotations in the book
are from the English novelist Lawrence Durrell and the American geogra-
pher Yi-Fu Tuan. The project, as Gillis presents it, combines creativity with
geography. The more comprehensive Human Shore begins with the demo-
graphics of the global human population’s “unprecedented surge to the sea,”
but it also turns to poetry on the next page, in this case a local Maine poet
from near Gillis’s summer home on Great Gott Island.28 These two books
initiate an ocean-centric historiography that includes personal experiences,
poetry, and fction, as well as assorted methodologies in the social sciences,
arts, and humanities.
In Islands of the Mind, the bridges that connect islands into archipela-
gos include literature. The island-centered world-making of transatlantic
movements has become in subsequent scholarship a principle of global con-
nection with special relevance for our age of environmental disruption. In
Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler’s book Anthropocene Islands (2021), per-
haps the most direct extension of Gillis’s early work, islands have become
both “a fgure for thought” and “key sites of ‘relational entanglements’ in
the Anthropocene.”29 Employing sophisticated eco-materialist theoretical
vocabulary, including such terms as “correlation” and “storiation,” Pugh and
Chandler present islands as key geographical concepts for an anxious age.
“The island,” they write, “has regularly been employed as a key fgure which
explicitly disrupts the grasp of modernist, linear and reductionist ‘mainland’
thinking” (5). Drawing especially on the postcolonial Caribbean writings
of Éduoard Glissant and Kamau Brathwaite, Pugh and Chandler frame the
island as fgure and reality. Like Gillis, they engage with historical realities
through the lens of poetry.
Both their work and Gillis’s island-thinking connect, in an underwa-
ter context, to a recent book by the marine archeologist Sara Rich, who
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 CHAPTER III
EMERSON
I find on looking backward that my development proceeded with
the help of a series of definitions fixing my attitude toward teachers
who made a special appeal to me, and toward great historic
tendencies past and present. I was helped both by what I was able
to appreciate in them, and, where I diverged, by what they forced
me to think out for myself. Here let me acknowledge a passing debt
to Emerson. As in the case of Kant, a strong attraction drew me
toward Emerson with temporary disregard of radical differences,—
although the spell was never so potent or so persistent in the latter
instance as in the former. I made Emerson’s acquaintance in 1875. I
came into touch with the Emerson circle and read and re-read the
Essays. The value of Emerson’s teaching to me at that time
consisted in the exalted view he takes of the self. Divinity as an
object of extraneous worship for me had vanished. Emerson taught
that immediate experience of the divine power in self may take the
place of worship. His doctrine of self-reliance also was bracing to a
youth just setting out to challenge prevailing opinions and to urge
plans of transformation upon the community in which he worked.
But I soon discovered that Emerson overstresses self-affirmation at
the expense of service. For a time indeed I reconciled in my own
fashion the two contrary tendencies. The divine power, I argued,
flows through me as a channel—hence the grandeur which attaches
to my spiritual nature. But the divine power manifests itself in
redressing the wrongs that exist in the world, and in putting an end
to such violations of personality as the sexual and economic
exploitations which disgrace human society. So for a time I
continued to walk on air with Emerson, and had my head in the
clouds,—the clouds in which Emerson enveloped me.
Out of this false sense of security, this quasi-pantheistic self-
affirmation, the experiences of the next few years effectually roused
me. I came to see that Emerson’s pantheism in effect spoils his
ethics. Be thyself, he says, not a counterfeit or imitation of someone
else. Be different. But why! Because the One manifests itself in
endless variety. Penetrating below the surface, however, one finds
that in this kind of philosophy the value of difference, to which I
attach essential importance on ethical grounds, is nothing more than
that of a foil. According to Emerson life is a universal masquerade,
and the interest of the whole business of living consists in the ever-
renewed discovery that the face behind the different masks is still
the same. Difference is not cherished on its own account. And here,
as in the case of the uniformity principle of Hebraism, I found myself
dissenting.
Emerson is a kind of eagle, circling high up in the ether—non soli
cedit.
Emerson with his oracular sayings might have served as a priest at
Dodona or led the mysteries at Eleusis. Yet, withal, he is genuinely
American,—a rare blend of ancient mystic and modern Yankee,—a
valued poet too, but as an ethical guide to be accepted only with
large reservations.
 CHAPTER IV
THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS
At about this time I began to occupy myself more seriously than I
had done before, with the study of the New Testament. I had, I
think a great advantage in my approach to it, for the very reason
that I had not been brought up in the Christian tradition. I came
from the outside, with a mind fresh to receive first-hand
impressions. I had not had instilled into me from childhood the kind
of hesitant awe that prevents impartial appraisement of excellences
and of possible deficiencies. On the other hand, as a searcher I was
deeply interested to ascertain what Christianity could give me, and
to what extent it could further my spiritual development. I had not
the enforcedly apologetic attitude; I did not come prepared to accept
without question nor yet to find fault; I came to test for my own
use. Here am I, with life and its problem before me—how can the
teachings of Jesus help me in my search, in my dire perplexities?
I must say to begin with that I was particularly struck with the
originality of Jesus’ teachings, a quality in them which to my
amazement I had found disputed, not only by Jews, but by
representative Christians. In Jewish circles it is not uncommon to
speak almost condescendingly of Christianity as of a daughter
religion commissioned to spread abroad the truths of Judaism, with
such alloy as may be needed to suit them to the apprehension of the
gentiles. But Christian teachers likewise—I remember particularly a
recent sermon to that effect—have taken the ground that Jesus
added nothing new to the ethical insight of mankind. His work, it is
said, consisted merely in supplying a sufficient motive for performing
the duties which everyone knows, but which, lacking this motive, we
are supposedly impotent to practice. This strange misapprehension
of the intimate nature of Jesus’ contribution to ethical progress is
largely due, I take it, to the poverty of our moral vocabulary.
Language puts at our disposal only a few terms, such as Justice,
Righteousness, Love,—which must needs stand for a great variety of
moral ideas. Thus Justice in Plato’s use of the word, implies that “a
shoemaker shall stick to his last,” that those who perform the
humble functions shall be content to perform them in due
subservience to their superiors. A very different meaning was
attached to justice by the Hebrew prophets as I have explained in
the last chapter. Again, a quite different conception of justice is
framed and stressed by modern social reformers. Now it is this
ambiguity of the moral vocabulary that conceals the novelty of Jesus’
precepts. Thus, to mention only a single capital instance, it has been
asserted that the Golden Rule as taught by Jesus is not original, but
substantially the same rule that had been laid down by Confucius
500 years before the time of Jesus. But on closer scrutiny it will be
seen that the two Golden Rules are by no means the same. As
propounded by the Chinese sage the rule appears to mean: Keep
the balance true between thyself and thy neighbor; illustrate in thy
conduct the principle of equilibrium. As impressed upon his disciples
by Jesus it means: Look upon thy neighbor as thy other self; act
towards him as if thou wert he.
To return to my point, the impression of novelty which I received
in reading the Gospels was definite and striking. The mythological
idealization of Jesus, indeed, I put aside as a thing that did not
concern me. On the other hand, to say with certain modern liberals
that he was just a man, an infinitely gracious personality, one who
exemplified in his life the virtues of forgiveness and self-sacrifice, did
not satisfy me either. Buddha too had taught forgiveness: “For
hatred is not conquered by hatred at any time; hatred is conquered
by love.” It could not then be the bare precept of forgiveness that
lets light on the secret of Jesus. And self-sacrifice—“Greater love
hath no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his
friend”—had been practiced within and without the pale of
Hebraism.
That he continued the work of his Hebrew predecessors I made
no doubt. On the Hebrew side he was a prophet, or rather, a saint in
Israel. But I had just as little doubt that he took a step beyond his
predecessors, that his teachings bear upon them the signature of
originality.
To put my thought briefly, I came to conclude that the ethical
originality of Jesus consists in a new way of dealing with the
problem of evil, that is, of evil in the guise of oppression. The
prophets, his predecessors, as we have seen, identified injustice with
oppression; and in the first flush of their moral enthusiasm the more
optimistic among them believed that justice as they conceived of it
would presently triumph and that oppression would cease altogether
—“Arise, shine, for thy light is come.” God would miraculously
interfere, and bring about on earth a state of righteousness. But
years and centuries passed by, and oppression, far from ceasing,
became under the ruthless administration of Rome ever more
grinding and terrible. The yoke of Rome weighed upon the Jews as it
did upon other peoples; but perhaps, because they were more
independent in spirit, it galled them more sorely. The fiery zealots
among the Jews persisted in hoping that by supreme desperate
efforts, God coming to their aid, they might yet succeed in shaking
off this yoke—efforts which culminated in the horrors of the last
siege of Jerusalem. Jesus was not of their way of thinking. He seems
indeed to have believed that the end of the existing order was near.
It was too incredibly bad to last. The world would be consumed by
fire. A new earth and a new heaven would appear. But in the
meantime how accommodate oneself to the intolerable fact of
oppression? Jesus said, Resist not evil in the guise of oppression, it
is irresistible. He mentions in particular three forms of intolerable
oppression: a blow in the face, the stripping of a man of his
garment, and the coercing him to do the arbitrary bidding of
another. He says, Resist not evil, resist not oppression. Shall then
evil triumph? Is the victim helplessly at the mercy of the injurer?
Shall he even be told that in a servile spirit he must accept the
indignities that are put upon him? No; this is not the meaning. Quite
a different meaning is implied. And here the teaching of Jesus takes
its novel turn. There is a way, he says to the victim, in which you can
spiritually triumph over the evildoer, and make your peace with
irresistible oppression. Use it as a means of self-purification; pause
to consider what the inner motives are that lead your enemy, and
others like him, to do such acts as they are guilty of, and to so
violate your personality and that of others. The motives in them are
lust, greed, anger, wilfulness, pride. Now turn your gaze inward upon
yourself, look into your own heart and learn, perhaps to your
amazement, that the same evil streams trickle through you; that
you, too, are subject, even if it be only subconsciously and
incipiently, to the same appetites, passions, and pride, that animate
your injurers. Therefore let the sufferings you endure at the hands
of those who allow these bad impulses free rein in their treatment of
you lead you to expel the same bad impulses that stir potentially in
your breast; let this experience fill you with a deeper horror of the
evil, and prove the incentive to secure your own emancipation from
its control. In this way you will achieve a real triumph over your
enemy, and will be able to make your peace with oppression. There
are other intolerable evils in the world besides oppression which
nevertheless must be tolerated. The method of Jesus can be applied
to these also. This method I regard as a permanent contribution to
the ethical progress of humanity.
A second original trait in Jesus’ teaching I found in his conception
of the spiritual nature, and of his doctrine of love as dependent on
that conception. The conception or definition is still negative as in
the non-violation ethics of the Hebrew prophets. The spiritual
element in man is hidden. It cannot be apprehended as to what it is
substantively. The attributes ascribed to it are the effects in which it
manifests itself; this goes without saying. To define the spiritual
nature means to describe these effects, these manifestations.
According to the Hebrew predecessors of Jesus the spiritual power is
to be conceived of as that which prompts a man to respect the holy
precinct of personality in others and in himself. What the holy thing
is remains unknown. This view leads to acts of justice and mercy, as
above explained. According to Jesus the spiritual essence in man
bids him expel the inner, impure impulses that lead to external
violations. In brief, the spiritual power is conceived of in terms of
purity. It is the pure thing in man that thrusts out as alien to itself
whatever is impure—whatever is of the world, the flesh, and, in
mythological language, whatever is Satanic. In this sense I say that
the definition is negative. It marks out, indeed, a definite line of
conduct; and it even leads, as we shall presently see, to active
efforts in a specific direction. A negative principle may have certain
positive results. But in the main, nevertheless, the teaching of Jesus
enlightens us as to what shall not be rather than as to what shall be.
From the Hebrew prophets we learn that there shall not be violation
of personality or injustice, the positive concomitant being mercy;
from Jesus’ teachings we learn that there shall not be impurity in the
inner forum, the positive by-product being the doctrine of love.
Taking over the Hebrew heritage, Jesus affirmed that the spiritual
nature exists in all human beings. In every man there is presumed to
be this inner power to reject the unclean admixtures, to ward off
and repel the carnal solicitations, to withdraw from the “world,” and
to move upward toward the source of purity, which is God. The
spirituality of man consisting of purity, the Father-God, the Father of
Lights, is likewise conceived as the absolutely pure, in this sense as
the most holy. In every man there is a ray of the eternal light
emanating from the eternal luminary, and all men are one in so far
as their rays converge at the focus of Godhead. To love men is to be
conscious of one’s unity with them in the central life, and to give
effect to this consciousness. Hence Christian love, the love that
Jesus taught, is no earthly love, no mere sentiment, or outreaching
of the human affections. On the contrary, the natural human ties are
repeatedly set aside in the logia. To love another is to love him in
God. Later the current phrase became, to love him in Christ; that is,
to think of him, and act towards him, as if he possessed the same
capacity for purity with oneself.
The love of others in God or Christ encouraged a particular kind of
earthly beneficence, and it especially inspired the followers of Jesus
with an unparalleled zeal in works of remedial (though never of
preventive) charity. This may at first sight seem paradoxical. The
young man is advised to dispossess himself of all he has, and in the
same breath is told to distribute his possessions among the poor.
Why not rather scatter them to the winds? Why should not the poor
too cease to toil and spin and take heed for the morrow? For their
simple necessities God would provide. The two-fold attitude,
however, is easy to understand if we remember that certain acts of
helpfulness have a symbolic significance, as attesting the value we
set upon the person to whose needs we minister, much as a flower
offered to a beloved person emblematically intimates our sense of
the beauty and worth of the one to whom the tribute is offered.
Christian charity, on its earthly side, has a similar meaning and
purpose. It is intended to efface the indignity to which human beings
are subjected when reduced to extreme indigence or allowed to
suffer without relief, for it is the disdain of the spiritual personality
thus evinced which Jesus disallows. He bids his followers intimate by
earthly tokens their consciousness of the super-earthly worth of their
fellow-beings. But the pursuit of riches as such he nowhere
encourages—quite the contrary. And it is certainly a mistake to
represent Jesus, as has recently been done, as a kind of precursor of
modern Socialism, and to think of him as one who, if he had lived in
our time, would have laid stress on equality of opportunity for all to
gain earthly possessions. He who advocated wealth for none could
not be supposed to have sympathized with a social movement
whose first object it is to secure wealth for all.
It is this interpretation of love that helped me to understand the
interior meaning of the doctrine of the forgiveness of enemies as
taught by Jesus, and to perceive wherein it differs from the
apparently identical mode of behavior enjoined by Buddha and the
Stoic Seneca. It plays a capital rôle in Jesus’ teaching. As illustrated
by the proto-martyr Stephen it probably effected the conversion of
Paul. Jesus says: “Bless them that curse you.” But how is it possible
to bless those that curse us? How, for instance, was it possible for
Stephen to bless the men of blood at the very moment when they
were crushing him under stones? To bless them that curse you, to
bless them that despitefully use you, means to distinguish between
the spiritual possibilities latent in them and their overt conduct, to
see the human, the potentially divine face behind the horrible mask,
and to invoke the influence of the divine power upon them in order
that it may change them into their purer, better selves.
With complete and eager appreciation of the points of excellence
contained in these teachings, with a reverence which it is impossible
to express in words for their incomparable Author, and with a large
sense of the beneficent influence which they have exercised on
human history, I still could not avoid the question, so vital for me,
Have these ethical teachings of the great Master the stamp of finality
upon them? Has Jesus really spoken the last word in ethics? Is
nothing left for us but further to expand and apply the truth which
he laid down once and for all? When theology goes, the last stand of
apologetic writers is apt to be made on the ethics. The instinct to
claim finality for the religion in which one has been brought up
asserts itself in the claim that the moral teachings at least are
unexceptionable and valid for all time to come. The searcher who is
in great moral perplexities and who seeks help for others and
himself, is bound to ask and will ask in no captious spirit, is this so?
The decisive point is whether the ethical teachings of Jesus supply
a principle which enables us to work with zest in the world, to take
the keenest interest in all the manifold activities of human society, to
embrace the world with the view of penetrating it with a spiritual
purpose and of thus transforming it. Do these teachings exhibit a
way of making the world and the flesh instrumental to the spirit, or
do they serve to turn us away from the world and its interests, to
abandon the world in despair? Is the conception of spirituality as
purity adequate? Purity is certainly one aspect of morality; is it the
sole or the principal factor in it? The other-worldly attitude in the
Gospels is certainly clearly marked. It is the background on which
the ethical precepts stand forth. Tyrrel has argued as against
Harnack for the close connection between the thought of Jesus and
the apocalyptic vision. I asked myself, Can the apocalyptic vision,
that is to say the other-worldliness, be dissociated from the ethics,
or is the relation between them necessary?11 If the world is speedily,
almost immediately, coming to an end, then it is justifiable to prefer
celibacy to marriage, to ignore the state, to counsel disregard of the
toiling and the spinning. All of this is warranted on the assumption
that the order of things in which these institutions and activities
have their place is about to disappear.
But if this expectation is deceived, if things continue in their
ancient course, if the world and the flesh persist, taking on ever new
and more baffling shapes, how is a system of ethics which is based
on the assumption of one state of things to be reconciled with a
state of things exactly the opposite? How shall an ethical person
conduct himself in a world which his philosophy of life teaches him
to reject, but with which the necessities of his existence compel him
to come to terms day by day and hour by hour? There must then be
compromise. And the history of Christianity up to the present
moment is the record of such compromises. Monasticism was one of
the earliest. A distinction was made, so to speak, between perfect
and imperfect Christians, between a class of men and women who
lived in ascetic seclusion, as if the world did not exist, and another
class, the greater number, who managed ethically as best they
could, dependent on the supererogatory merits of the real Christians
or saints to eke out their unholiness. Another species of compromise
is illustrated, especially in Protestant countries. It appears as a
division between the contracted sphere of holiness and the
circumambient sphere of the practical life, in both of which, however,
the same individual has his place. Chastity, forgiveness of personal
enemies, and the like virtues are to be practiced in the contracted
sphere of private life, the ability to practice these virtues being
derived from mystical identification with Jesus. In the Christian’s
public life no such identification is possible, and he is left to be
consciously or unconsciously unholy. As a politician, as a competitor
in the struggle for wealth, he remains without ethical direction. The
ethical ideal of the Gospels requires for its setting the apocalyptic
vision. It derives its cogency from the belief that the world is about
to perish. Can it serve as a sufficient guide to those who must live in
the world, and affirm their ethical personality in dealing with it? In
politics, in business, in science, in art, must we not somehow see
our way to the conception that these great interests are not alien to
the spiritual nature, introducing perchance impure admixtures into it,
but rather can be made subservient or instrumental to it? Yes; but
instrumental in what way? At this point, not only the Christian
system, but every one of the systems of ethics that have arisen
since then has failed. And it is, moreover, perfectly evident that the
instrumental function of the sex relation or of the pursuit of
knowledge or of patriotism cannot be determined unless we first
answer the one question which the ethical writers are in the habit of
evading—Instrumental to what end? What is the ethical end?
Instruments are means to ends—how can the means be rightly
appraised without a definite conception of the end? And if the end
be the affirmation of our ethical personality, of our spiritual nature,
of that holy thing in us without which man loses his worth (and
without which the rule of non-violation itself falls to the ground,
since where there is nothing inviolable there can be no
infringement), it is plain that we must seek a positive definition of
the spiritual nature which shall serve as a principle of regulation
where the empty concept of purity has manifestly failed.
Christian ethics has promoted the moral development of mankind
in a thousand ways. It has helped even by its mythological
embodiment of a transcendental idea to place the individual more
firmly on his feet. It has emphasized the inner springs of conduct; it
has given prominence to certain principal virtues of the private life;
but, like every product of the mind and aspirations of man, it
exhibits the limitations of the time and of the social conditions under
which it arose. The conditions have since changed. Society has
become infinitely more complex, and in consequence new moral
problems have forced themselves upon men’s attention; and with
the help of Christianity itself the human race has advanced beyond
the point of view for which Christianity stands.12
 Speaking again only for myself I could not assent to the position
that finality appertains to the ethical teachings of the Gospel, that
they or their Author have spoken the last word in ethics. I could not
persuade myself that this is so because I failed to get from these
teachings, inestimably precious as they are, an answer to the
question that most pressed upon me—Instrumental in what sense,
instrumental to what end?
 CHAPTER V
SOCIAL REFORM
My position at that time may be summarized as follows: There is a
divine power in the world, not individual, manifest in the moral law
as revealed in human experience. The moral law involves recognition
of the presence of a something holy in each human being. Since the
world presents innumerable examples of the grossest violation of
human personality (e.g., prostitution and exploitation of laborers),
the business immediately in hand is to make an end of these
violations. There was as yet in my mind no positive definition of
personality. Clarification and further development were promoted by
the necessity of grappling with the problems of poverty and with the
attempted solutions of the Socialists and of other social reformers.
At this period, the notion of personality in my mind being still
without determinate content, empirical matter intruded, and a
species of millennialism for a time vitiated my thinking. In order to
set up a goal for humanity, I dallied with Utopias, and flattered my
imagination with the vision of something like a state of ultimate
earthly felicity. The cheap cry of “Let us have heaven on earth” was
also on my lips, though the delusion did not last long and perhaps
never penetrated very deeply.
The problem of poverty, as mentioned above, engrossed me early.
I acted as chairman of the meeting at which Henry George was first
introduced to the public in New York City. But Henry George’s
remedy,—a single draught of Socialism with unstinted individualism
thereafter—never attracted me, while his descriptions of the misery
of the poor, eloquent as they were, and fitted to awaken persons
unacquainted with actual conditions, conveyed to me no novel
message. I had before then been profoundly stirred by the chapters
in Karl Marx’s Kapital in which he collects from the English Blue
Books frightful evidence of the mistreatment of laborers and
especially of children in the early part of the nineteenth century. My
errands in the tenement slums of New York had also made me fairly
familiar with the bitter facts, and throughout my life I have been in
touch in a practical way with the appalling complexus of misery and
wrong which we abstractly designate as the Labor Question. I shall
not here take time to discuss Socialism or other social reform
movements in detail. My intention is to sketch a certain philosophy
of life, and to trace the steps by which I reached it. My reaction
against Socialism and related movements, however, was a prime
factor in this inner development; and it is of this reaction and the
causes of it that I must speak.
The evils inherent in poverty are, in the first place, obviously, the
privations entailed by it; secondly, the fact that the greater part of
the life of the poor is consumed in efforts to provide the bare
necessaries, the mind being thus kept in bondage to bodily needs
and prevented from rising to other interests more appropriate to
rational beings; thirdly, the fact that the first two wrongs are caused,
not wholly it is true, but yet in a large measure, by fellow human
beings.13 The sting in poverty is not so much the hardships suffered,
as the contempt for the manhood of the poor, exhibited by their
exploiters,—the inequity being thus turned into iniquity.
Now my reaction against Socialism was and is that it neglects the
third, the moral evil, and stresses only the first and second. I am
now speaking of Marxian Socialism, with which in its rigid form I
early acquainted myself. The Marxian Socialist does not deny the
pain felt in consequence of the inequity, nor the desire of those who
suffer to become the equals of their masters; but he regards this
desire as a fact of nature explicable on deterministic grounds, a
consequence of improvement in the technique or tools of industry.
He does not deny that there are so-called moral ideas, but he
considers them epiphenomena or by-products of economic
development. The tendency toward equilibrium of power in human
society, termed democracy, is to him just a fact and nothing more.
The mere desire for it apart from the rightness of the desire is the
efficient cause which leads to social readjustments. But evidently
this account of the matter will be persuasive only in case the
efficient cause proves to be really efficient, that is to say, in case the
desire for equilibration is on the point of effectuating itself. If it is
not, if the desire of the masses for power is thwarted, if the
realization of their hopes is indefinitely postponed, then the
foundations of the theory are undermined. Hence Marxian Socialism
has been coupled with and depends on a belief which is a kind of
materialistic parallel of the apocalyptic vision of Jesus,—the belief
that the end of the present world (the world of the wage system) is
close at hand, only with the difference that the end is to be brought
about not by divine interference but automatically by the acquisition
of power on the part of the masses.
To me neither hunger nor the bondage of the mind to physical
necessities nor the bare fact of inequity seem sufficient to justify the
demand for social reconstruction, apart from moral right. If there be
no such thing as morality, or if morality be but an epiphenomenon of
economic conditions, what warrant have the hungry or the
disadvantaged for complaining? Animals, too, hunger and sicken. If
man be like them a mere chance product of nature, why should he
not share their fate? Let the weak succumb! Surely the bald fact that
the democratic masses today chafe under the yoke of their masters
and demand a better state of things, is no more a ground of
obligation for the former than the tendency toward an ultimate
equilibrium in nature of which scientists speak can be a ground of
obligation. The tendency will effectuate itself or not as the acting
forces determine. There is in truth no such thing as obligation from
this point of view. Then why not fold our arms and wait for what will
happen? The notion of democracy currently held is obnoxious to the
same criticism. Leave out the moral basis in the claim to equity, and
nothing remains but the brute fact that men, being egotists, fret
under the exercise of superior power by their fellow egotists. But let
Nietzsche or some one else demonstrate that certain higher values,
higher merely because subjectively relished as higher, are
incompatible with equilibrium of power, and he will be justified at
least in his own eyes in scoffing at equality and scourging the
democratic dogs back to their kennels. No one denies that the
masses have the desire to be treated as the equals of their masters
(very inconveniently for the latter), but it is quite another matter
whether their desire ought to be gratified. Social reconstruction, in
other words, must be motivated by other considerations than those
by which according to Marx the great change is to come about.
I have not stopped to consider whether the Socialistic scheme is
workable, whether the run of mankind are capable of coöperative
effort on a large scale without the preëminent leadership of master
minds; whether Socialism, if carried out, would really breed, as it is
expected to, the sentiment of ideal brotherhood; whether the
sentiment of brotherhood itself, unless it be rooted in the closer
family and national ties, is morally sound, whether the emotional
forces that sweep through and overwhelm large aggregations of
men, can be bridled and sufficiently enlightened to promote the ends
of Socialism. All such questions as these touch the feasibility of the
ideal proposed; my own reaction was and is against the ideal itself.
Instead of pronouncing as some do that mankind are not yet ripe to
carry out so high an ideal, I found myself seriously challenging and
finally rejecting the very ideal on the ground that it is not a genuine
moral ideal at all. It is ethically spurious, because it omits the notion
of right and substitutes for it that of power.
A different objection lies against certain modifications of Socialism
and against many of the social reform movements of our time. In
these movements the idea of personality is not absent as in Marx’s
theory. The inherent dignity of every human being is deeply felt, and
per contra the indignity of the present condition of the greater
number. Man is worth while; and for the sake of the worth in him,
the unfavorable circumstances which stifle the promise of his nature
are to be changed. My objection in this case is that the higher
spiritual nature of man, or the notion of personality, is left indefinite
and remains vaguely in the background. It supplies indeed the initial
motive for practical efforts; but the instrumental relation of the
goods of life to the supreme good is not apprehended positively. And
thus the door is left open, as we shall presently see, for corrupting
influences to enter in.
There seems, it is true, at first sight, considerable warrant for
demanding certain instant reforms without troubling about ulterior
spiritual ends. We are confronted in modern society with evils which
seem to require immediate abolition. Exploitation is palpably one of
them. It is the clearest possible case of trespass on personality. Why
not then demand respect simply for personality in general, without
inquiring into the nature of personality? Is it not beyond all question
dishonoring to human nature that some should be on the verge of
starvation while others are even themselves injured by excessive
possessions; that the energies of children should be exhausted by
premature toil; that adults should be worked like beasts of burden?
Why not leave in abeyance the definition of the supreme end, and
concentrate effort on the removal of these incontestable evils?
My answer to this is, in the first place, that we cannot gain the
best leverage even for these initial reforms without a high and
defined conception of man as a spiritual being. Efforts directed
toward improving even material conditions are apt to be fluctuating,
spasmodic, and are ever in danger of dying down, unless material
improvement is seen in its relation towards something else that
commands the highest respect—implicit respect. Sympathy alone is
altogether inadequate. It often works grave harm; it is notoriously
intermittent, at one time broadly expansive and then again
contracting upon the nearest objects. Furthermore, we can at best
sympathize genuinely with only a very limited number of persons. If
anyone were to open his heart to the sufferings of all the millions of
human beings at present engaged in conflict on the battlefields of
Europe; if he were to try to realize the indirect consequences of this
war; if he were to take a still wider sweep and embrace in his
imagination the populations of India, China, and the races of Africa,
the effect upon him would be simply paralyzing. The possible effect
of one’s sympathetic action upon this huge volume of human
suffering would appear so insignificant as to make exertion on his
part seem quite irrational. We are assisted by sympathy in the
matter of social reform by the narrowness of our horizons; and even
within these narrow boundaries the efficiency of the motive depends
largely upon the transciency of the sympathetic mood. Sympathy as
a permanent attitude would disintegrate the self.14
The second answer is that by ignoring the ultimate end we install
proximate ends in its place. The reform movements of our day
abstain from attempting to set up an ultimate good. They are
content, as they say, “to evaluate the tangible goods ready at hand.”
In consequence these tangible goods inevitably usurp the place of
the supreme good. Begin as we may with the high notion of
personality, we become materialists before we have proceeded very
far, and we infect the laboring masses with our materialism if we
omit to define the relation of proximate ends to the ultimate aim. For
remember that the ultimate end is that which prescribes the limits
within which the nearer aims are to be sanctioned,—the limit for
each being the degree in which it conduces toward the highest end.
Without a goal set up, without an explicit conception of its regulative
function, the proximate ends abound, and are likely to expand ad
indefinitum. This is evident, for instance, in the case of wealth-
getting. The poor have not enough wealth, the rich have too much.
“Let us then redress the balance by at least securing enough for the
poor. The necessary limitations we can discuss after they shall have
at least reached the limit of sufficiency.” But we are thus kindling the
desire for wealth; and this desire and its possible gratifications are
boundless. It is in the nature of desire to be prolific of new desire,
and to aim unceasingly at new satisfactions. First, a decent dwelling,
sufficient food, education for the children, are wanted, then luxury,
then millions, then multi-millions. Secondary motives take the place
of primary ones. Wealth becomes a token; the satisfactions it gives
are no longer related to actual wants or needs, but solely to a
fantastic desire for preëminence. Has not this been the actual history
of many of those who have risen from poverty to great riches? But
the same desires are present, though suppressed, unsatisfied, in the
masses, who look up to the few with admiration or envy. And
suppressed desires are often even more insidiously poisoning, more
contaminating in their effects than satisfied desires.
The psychological fact is that human volition as expressed in
action is always determined by some end. A means is never adopted
without there being some object or purpose in view. Leave out the
ultimate aim and the means become themselves the ends. A decent
subsistence should be treated as related to the ultimate end,— a
decent living, for example, as a means to fit the worker for the
duties of fatherhood and citizenship.
It may again be urged that what has been said is true only of the
ambitious minority, and that the masses would be quite content with
a decent subsistence if only that much could be assured them. But
the prevalence of cheap imitations of luxury among the poor points
in the opposite direction. At least in a democratic community, the
ambitions of the few are apt to be contagious. And where this is not
the case, as in some of the older countries of Europe, a certain
sordid Philistinism is apt to manifest itself. The life of the middle
class in Europe is without the restless brilliance that characterizes
the upward-striving class in America,—is not daringly but meanly
materialistic. Redeeming features are, of course, not wanting, yet
how anyone can conceive the social ideal as a state of things in
which the laboring people shall be raised to the level at present
occupied by the “middle class” is difficult for me to understand. Nor
is it a sufficient rejoinder to say that the present complexion of the
middle class, its narrowness and Philistinism, are due to isolation
from the social classes beneath them, and that the broad sentiment
of universal fellowship and fraternity, when it shall have come to
prevail, will purify the atmosphere on the middle level. I have
sufficiently indicated my doubts as to the efficiency and soundness
of what is called fraternalism.
In brief, if we are to preserve a man’s respect for himself as a
moral being, we must find a ground on which he can maintain his
self-esteem apart from the material conditions in which he is placed,
and in the interval before the desirable material changes can
possibly be accomplished. This interval is certain to be long. The
betterment of social conditions is sure to be gradual. The slum ought
to be abolished immediately, but until it goes we must find a reason
to respect the man in the slums even now, and a reason why he
should respect himself even now. This reason can only be derived
from the spiritual nature of man, from the spiritual end for which he
exists; and on this account, above all others, it is indispensable that
the spiritual end be defined. How painfully social reformers may be
led into error by slighting this consideration is seen in the readiness
with which some have subscribed to the amazing opinion that the
issue between chastity and dishonor for the working-girl depends
ultimately on the amount of her wages.
There are two fallacies that affect the social reform movements of
today. The substitution of power for right is one. What I venture to
call the fallacy of provisionalism is the second. This is the fallacy of
the opportunist movements. “Lead the laboring classes provisionally
up to the level of sufficiency, or of decent existence, and then we
shall see.” But man does not act without ends, and unless we define
the ultimate end, we give license to the proximate ends. In other
words, we simply cannot act provisionally. We cannot ignore our
spiritual nature without offending against it. We may start with the
idea of serving it, but without explicit definition of it we shall
presently find ourselves disgraced in all sorts of idolatries.
What I am trying to show is how I came to perceive the
inadequacy of the non-violation ethics. Its formula is: “Admit the
existence of personality; do not infringe upon it. In your actions for
the good of others, try to abolish the manifest infringements or
violations. Since there must be some positive content to the idea of
good, accept the material or empirical goods as the provisional
content with the general understanding that they are to be
instrumental to the higher life but without troubling to define exactly
how.”
The aberrations to which this view leads on the side of action
toward others I have pointed out. A word now as to the injurious
effect on self. Of these the following are the most important:
1. The leader in social reform is apt to be regarded by his
followers and to think of himself as a kind of savior. It is his sincere
intention to save society from some of the glaring evils with which it
is afflicted. But if salvation is sought in the betterment of external
conditions, the social savior is apt to become the victim of a false
sense of moral security. He is likely to be off his guard at the weak
points of his own character, and to fall abruptly from high levels into
the ditch.
2. The social reformer who adopts the fallacy of provisionalism is
apt to be absorbed in the mechanical details of his work,—the
settlement or the municipal reform society, or the charitable
association tend to become highly organized and efficient pieces of
machinery. But moral idealism declines in proportion as this kind of
efficiency increases,—the salt loses its savor.
3. The social reformer who sets his heart on external changes is
apt to become impatient to bring about those changes. For since he
attempts to work from without inwardly, and not at the same time
from within outwardly, he has nothing to show for his pains unless
the desired outward changes are actually effected. In this way may
be explained a certain dictatorial manner, a certain arbitrariness
sometimes observed in social workers of whose earnestness and
devotion there can be no question, the preposterous outcome being
that in attempting to carry out plans of reform in a democratic
community such reformers offend against the very principle of
democracy by over-riding the personality of others.
4. The Social reformer who concentrates his attention on external
changes is apt to be ambitious of large results, to measure
betterment by statistical standards. Though quality be not
overlooked, quantity is likely to be over-emphasized.
5. The painful spectacle is sometimes presented of a leader in
social movements who goes to pieces morally in his private relations
(becomes a bad father, a worthless husband, an unscrupulous
sponge on his friends, etc.). Absorption in extensive public
movements has this danger in it that it often tends to make men
neglectful of the nearer duties.
Facts of this kind, which came repeatedly under my observation in
the course of years, drove home to my mind the conviction that the
provisional method in social reform (the method of working for
external changes without definition of the end) is morally perilous,
both in its effects on those who are to be benefited, and in its
reaction on the character of the reformer himself. I parted company
with opportunism in every one of its forms; I became more and
more imbued with the belief that no one can really help others who
in the effort to do so is not himself morally helped, i.e., whose
character is not improved in every respect, who does not become a
better father, husband, citizen, a more upright man in all his
relations in and because of his endeavors to benefit society. I
became convinced that the ethical principle must run like a golden
thread through the whole of a man’s life, in a word, that social
reform unless inspired by the spiritual view of it, that is, unless it is
made tributary to the spiritual, the total end of life, is not social
reform in any true sense at all.15
The fundamental question, therefore, echoed and re-echoed with
ever intenser insistence: “What then is the holy thing in others?
What is the supreme end or good to which all the lesser goods
should be subordinate and subservient? And what is the holy thing in
me?—for I may not spiritually sacrifice myself. My own highest good
must be achievable in agreement with that of others. What definition
of the essential end is possible that shall reconcile egoism and
altruism by transforming and transcending them? And if there be
such end thinkable and definable, how establish the applicability of
this end to empirical man, either in the person of others or in my
own?”
 I shall have to dwell on this subject at length in the sequel. Here
at the outset I cannot forbear expressing my sense of the obliquities,
the folly, the meanness, the cruelties which human nature often
exhibits on the empirical side when dispassionately contemplated.
That there are also finer traits in people, gleams of gold in the
quartz, I do not deny. But even in the best exemplars of the race the
alloy is not wanting. And it is an open question how far any human
being, if his whole make-up and all the circumstances that
influenced him be considered, can be called predominantly good,
assuming that goodness is a matter of desert and not of chance.
How, therefore, a being that to actual, impartial observation reveals
himself as so dubiously worth while, can be regarded as possessing
the quality of transcendent worth (which seems to be implied in the
idea of personality as inviolable and precious) will be the starting
point of my inquiry into the philosophical first principle in the second
part of this volume.
 CHAPTER VI
THE INFLUENCE OF MY VOCATION ON INNER
DEVELOPMENT
The present chapter deals with my inner development as I believe
it to have been furthered by my connection with the Society for
Ethical Culture. The functions intrusted to me in this connection
were, first, various forms of so-called philanthropic activity. The
effects of the experience gathered in them has been described in a
preceding chapter; they may be summed up in the formula:
littleness in the external results achieved, consciousness of moral
danger to self.
Secondly, the ministerial function of offering “edification” in public
addresses to Sunday assemblies, the solemnizing of marriages, and
the conducting of funeral services,—while in addition a large part of
my vocational life consisted in the building up of an educational
institution.16
The Public Addresses. Edification, or building up, as I understood
it, involved the profoundly difficult task of supplying a working
philosophy of life without traveling into the field of metaphysics,
teaching the practicable counterpart of a connected system of
thought concerning the problems of life,—the system being so firmly
knit as to make the appropriate feelings and impulses more or less
natural to its exponent. In my case, not having fallen heir to such a
system, the task of edification became doubly difficult. It meant
from the beginning unceasing self-edification, with a view to edifying
others.17 Setting out with a general scheme along Kantian lines, I
proceeded to fill in the outline in the course of my public teachings,
with the result that the content filled in eventually disrupted the
scheme, and compelled a thoroughgoing reconstruction. The
Holiness conception had been my starting point. I never gave it up. I
was attracted to Kant because he affirmed it. I broke with him
because he does not make good his affirmation.
I began with Kantianism, which is predominantly individualistic,
and I found that in dealing with the problems of the family, with the
labor question, and in the attempt to reach an ideal of democracy
beyond the materialistic conception of it which is at present current
—I was introducing into my initial sketch elements incompatible with
individualism, and necessitating formulation in social terms. And
since I retained and stressed the notion of personality, I had to seek
a way of interpreting the term Social spiritually, as Kant had
undertaken to interpret the term individual spiritually. I certainly
could not fall in with Darwinism or other evolutionary interpretations
of sociality, inasmuch as they all leave out the concept of inviolable
personality, the indefeasible factor in my ethical thinking.
These things are here alluded to in order to emphasize the
influence of the public Sunday addresses delivered by me regularly
for more than forty years in stimulating, I had almost said forcing,
my ethical growth. To care for anyone else enough to make his
problem one’s own is ever the beginning of one’s real ethical
development. To care for a group of people in the sense of being
challenged to suggest to them ideas and ways of behavior that shall
really be of use to them in the storm and stress of life, is the most
searching incentive to self-development imaginable. It is more
powerful than the desire to get truth for one’s own sake. The closet
philosopher may be serious enough in his search for truth, and he
may succeed in constructing a symmetrical system which at the time
seems complete. Will it stand wear and tear? Will it in the bitter
moments of his life hold together? If not, he has failed; but then he
only is the loser, it is only his ship that has gone down. But the
situation is different when a company of people venture with you on
the same voyage, and trust to you as in a way their pilot.
The challenge that comes from the expectant eyes of those who
are in trouble, of those whose relations to their friends or the
members of their family have become tangled, the challenge that
comes from the larger public towards which every public speaker has
a certain ethical duty—all these challenges press home the question:
are the things that you believe true, so true that you may confidently
expect them to be confirmed by the experience of those who in
some measure depend upon you? Are they genuinely of use?
There is also another kind of challenge that in a way is even more
taxing and searching: the silent appeal that comes from those who
are spiritually dead, from those who are sunk in sloth or sensuality,
or who waste their precious days in the pursuit of trivial, frivolous
ends, and from the insensitive consciences of the self-righteous and
the self-complacent. In the Bible we read that the prophet Elisha
once threw himself on the body of a dead child, in order with his
own life to kindle there the life that seemed extinct. In some such
way in public addresses, in which it is not the word but the
personality behind the word that counts, the speaker is bound to
throw himself body and soul, as it were, upon those who are
spiritually numbed, and to enhance the life within himself in order to
stir up life in them. All of which means that the task of edifying
others involves continuous efforts at self-edification.
The Solemnizing of Marriages. In solemnizing marriages I had the
experience that some of those at which I had officiated ended
disastrously,—there had been no real marriage at all. Though such
instances were not numerous in my own experience, yet the
statistics of divorce prove that the number of unfortunate marriages
in this and other countries is very large, and is increasing. What are
the foundations of a permanent relation such as would tend to the
development of personality in and through marriage? was the
question urged upon me. Here is a social tie in which two
individuals, and later the offspring, are combined in the closest
propinquity. How can an ethical theory of marriage be reached, that
is, a theory dependent on the idea of the joint realization of the
highest end of life by the members of the family group? This ethical
theory of marriage will be set forth in a subsequent part of this
volume. Here I wish again to mark the retroactive effect of the
function I was called upon to exercise in the Ethical Society on the
development of theory. The most incisive effect of my practical
experience, however, was the being compelled to encounter the
effect of frustration. How reluctant is the natural man to face this
fact! How he shrinks, and puts up screens between his face and the
head of Medusa! In my earliest marriage addresses I remember how
I used to describe the relation as one in which each of the partners
receives the cup of happiness at the hands of the other. The second
time I performed the ceremony, the bride was the only child of
excellent friends, whose life was completely wrapped up in their one
daughter. She was a charming young girl, and the bridegroom was a
fine-grained person entirely devoted to her. That marriage feast I
shall never forget. A little less than a year after, the young wife
having died in child-birth, I was called in to speak at her bier. Where,
then, was the exchange of happiness? How suddenly had the house
of bliss fallen into ruins! A similar experience that touched me even
more deeply was that of a friend, the first one among my associates
who believed with me in the possibility of a religious society without
a dogmatic creed. The course of love in his case had not run
smooth. The marriage between himself and the lovely young woman
he wedded was the happy culmination of many trials, a haven of
peace after storms. Hardly more than two years elapsed when he
suddenly developed a fatal form of mental disease, and lingered for
ten years in a long, slow, degrading decline. I thus became
acquainted with frustration in one of its most woeful shapes. I
remember how the poor young wife, during those ten years, widow
in all but name, sought alleviation in various directions for her
intolerable grief. Work to occupy her mind was one; caring for the
needs of the poor another. I remember also how futile these devices
seemed. She had lived “on the heights”; she must now descend to
lower levels; she had had first best, she must now put up with
second or third best. Gladly indeed would she have exchanged
places with some of the poor women whom she assisted, could she
have kept her husband at her side as they had theirs. It was well
enough for her to try to alleviate the troubles of these people, but
what were their sorrows compared to hers? And to keep the mind
occupied by work, what was it at best but a temporary anodyne?
When the work was over, in the still, lonely hours of the night, the
storm of grief would break with all the greater violence. I had not
taught these my friends a really valid spiritual conception of the
purpose of marriage: I had failed in that: and when they were in
need of it they did not have it to support them. They had looked on
marriage as a scene of felicity; they had not been taught to make
allowance for the frustration.
I had not made preparation for the palpable frustrations just
mentioned, nor yet for others, for the discovery that the beloved
person is faulty, that the nimbus of divine personality does not
coincide with the character. And especially did the lack of any explicit
idea of personality prove fatal in those cases where the frustration is
most serious, where real or apparent incompatibilities appear, or
where actual degeneration occurs, and the hope of regeneration
becomes remote.
Bereavement was the second shape in which the fact of frustration
most often came home to me. Hundreds of times I have spoken to
people in the moment of the last leave-taking. The usual
consolations, aside from those that depend on mythological beliefs,
are: Submit to the inevitable; clinch your teeth and face the storms
of fate. Remember the debt you owe to the living. There is work that
remains for you to do. See to it that you do not by excessive
grieving destroy your capacity for work. Instead of indulging in
sorrow for your own loss, take upon yourself the sorrows of others.
In particular it is uplifting for one who has been more severely
afflicted to take upon himself the sorrow of those whose burden is
lighter. Be grateful for what you have possessed. Think not so much
of what you have lost, as of what you were privileged for a season
to call your own. Make the virtues of those who are no longer living
a force for good in your own life. Paint the portrait of your friend
incessantly. Retouch it. Eliminate what was of merely transient value
in him. Remember him in the light of his best qualities, and live so
as to be able to endure his purified glance. Or, in the case of those
whose lives were stained, seek to expiate their faults in your life.
Purify and perpetuate them in this way in yourself. Memory is not a
mere passive receptacle, it is rather a creative faculty. Let it play
upon the lives that are no longer sensibly present, and thus maintain
the connection with them. A friend living across the sea, whom you
will never see again, may yet be a living presence for you if you
continue by the aid of memory to be in communication with him. In
the case of the departed, likewise, their effectual influence may
remain none the less real.
These various modes of consolation have each a certain value. To
the one last mentioned I attach the greatest value. Bereavement is a
challenge for a fresh start in spiritual development. It should not
mean putting up with the second best, but reaching out toward first
best. The object to be achieved by the ethical teacher on such
occasions is to help the bereaved to tie anew the threads that have
been sundered, or rather to substitute a more ethereal but firmer tie
for the contacts mediated by the senses. But this task of the
reweaving of ties, spiritually, not sensibly, depends entirely for its
success upon a spiritual conception of personality. And if this be
lacking, the attempt is hopeless. Frustration itself must be
recognized as partial if it is to lead beyond itself. There must be
found in man that which cannot be defeated if the defeat is not to
be accepted as final.
A third kind of frustration was brought home to me by the
problem of specialization, as it presented itself in the course of my
efforts to work out an ethical theory true to the facts of life. To
discharge competently my own special function, I saw that I ought
to be acquainted with the best ethical thought of the past. This
meant an exhaustive study of the philosophical systems of which the
ethical thought of the philosophers is the fruit. I ought further to be
familiar with the great religions, in which so much of the ethical
insight of mankind is incorporated. I ought to acquaint myself with
the moral history of mankind in so far as it is accessible, including
that of the primitive races. I ought to gain a survey of the variations