Listen to Marvin read In the Classroom–1958
I passed the orals well; my chairman viewed
Me warmly, embracing me as a peer;
And let me teach “Great Books” at NYU—
“General Ed” for cold-eyed engineers.
When we got to Melville (my heart’s dark Knight),
To lift them from complexity’s black pit,
I spoke of “The Doubloon” to shape insight
Into doomed men. There Ahab says: “‘tis fit
That man should live in pains and die in pangs.”
For Starbuck, “the sun of Righteousness still
Shines.” And, jollily, Stubb, like God above,
Wheels through toil and trouble. And here comes Flask
Who sees, in that gold coin, just sixteen bucks,
Nine hundred sixty cigars, motive great
Enough to hunt demonic Moby Dick.
My scorn for Flask was palpable. Then fate:
My brightest scholar, serious, not flip:
“That Flask’s the only sane man on the ship.”
Those students will design: with arcane arts,
Build bridges, create grids, generate pelf,
Nurture ideas, increase the nation’s wealth.
The cost? That ax left buried in my heart.
(1/6/07)
In “The Doubloon,” Chapter 99 of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, each of the Pequod’s officers gazes at the gold doubloon that Ahab has nailed to the mast as a reward to the crewman who sights the great white whale. That whale, for Ahab, is the embodiment of a natural evil that must be confronted. Starbuck sees in the doubloon, a manifestation of God’s righteousness. Stubb sees the zodiac around the edge of the coin as a representation of man’s comical journey from one tribulation to another. Flask sees money.