Reading with the dolphins

Before he splashed away (like Flipper), the Tursiops truncates suggested an anthology of helpful readings. Astounded that he was literate at all, it did not bother me that he was not up to date.

The bottlenose’s obvious deficiencies in being au courant should in no way detract from our careful reading of his narrative.

Here is the first of his readings:

But at least the anti-individualistic --

Flipper suggested here a consistent substitution of “individual” with “personal,” since the text is written in the less precise year of 1930

-- forces had at last shown themselves unmistakably for what they were, and so had given him a conception of something eminently worth doing – namely, to wage an individual civil revolt against the established economic fetish. For now he had a fuller realization that the prevalent order affected not only those who had become “almost mechanical” at their machines or office desks, but, in a lesser degree, perhaps, but still visibly, affected any person who subsisted where this order was generally accepted. William --

“Who is William?” I asked; the patient dolphin answered, “Obviously a simulacrum, perhaps a representation of the essayist himself”

-- understood himself well enough to know that not all of his ego was active; that there was a lazy part being catered to, invited to partake of manufactured products of which he had no real need, and, what seemed a thousand times worse, was being invited to renounce the ardors of individualized leisure for the effortless diversions of seeing motion pictures chaste from having no carnal connection with life, reading boiler-plate fiction on the run, professing a travestied Christianity so nicely abstracted as to require little effort, and that only intellectual, hearing tasteless music and lyrical soap advertisements from a horn as one ate or read or solved cross-word puzzles --

“Obviously a more literate age,” clicked Flipper in echolocation, wondering where the academy went,

-- and, all other pastimes failing, riding in the ubiquitous automobile --

“At least William,” I averred, “still went out to the real outside” … “We happier swimmers cannot know about virtual reality,” answered the sea mammal.

These blandishments were strong for William; no one knew it better than he himself. He had a decided taste for the material luxuries of life – but a selective one.

    In his very selectivity he thought he espied his salvation; for the active part of him became increasingly wary of material benefits; they could too easily be sops thrown to pale creatures that once were men, in order to reimburse them for the loss of their souls

“Ouch,” I said … said Flipper, “Touché”.

This mistrust he kept secret from his friends as a matter of policy; he did not care to be scoffed at as a Puritan ascetic; he chose, rather, to think of himself as a critical skeptic. A line from a useless classic haunted him to sound the fundamental tone of his spiritual state: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

“I hate it when they use Latin,” I muttered, “it makes me feel so very low.”

-- adapted from "A study in individualism," by Henry Blue Kline (1930, pp. 318-9)