Pierre or the Ambiguities
Copyright© 2025 by Herman Melville
Book 9
MORE LIGHT, AND THE GLOOM OF THAT LIGHT. MORE GLOOM, AND THE LIGHT OF THAT GLOOM.
I.
IN those Hyperborean regions, to which enthusiastic Truth, and Earnestness, and Independence, will invariably lead a mind fitted by nature for profound and fearless thought, all objects are seen in a dubious, uncertain, and refracting light. Viewed through that rarefied atmosphere the most immemorially admitted maxims of men begin to slide and fluctuate, and finally become wholly inverted; the very heavens themselves being not innocent of producing this confounding effect, since it is mostly in the heavens themselves that these wonderful mirages are exhibited.
But the example of many minds forever lost, like undiscoverable Arctic explorers, amid those treacherous regions, warns us entirely away from them; and we learn that it is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind; for arrived at the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points, there, the needle indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike.
But even the less distant regions of thought are not without their singular introversions. Hardly any sincere man of ordinary reflective powers, and accustomed to exercise them at all, but must have been independently struck by the thought, that, after all, what is so enthusiastically applauded as the march of mind, —meaning the inroads of Truth into Error—which has ever been regarded by hopeful persons as the one fundamental thing most earnestly to be prayed for as the greatest possible Catholic blessing to the world;—almost every thinking man must have been some time or other struck with the idea, that, in certain respects, a tremendous mistake may be lurking here, since all the world does never gregariously advance to Truth, but only here and there some of its individuals do; and by advancing, leave the rest behind; cutting themselves forever adrift from their sympathy, and making themselves always liable to be regarded with distrust, dislike, and often, downright—though, ofttimes, concealed—fear and hate. What wonder, then, that those advanced minds, which in spite of advance, happen still to remain, for the time, ill-regulated, should now and then be goaded into turning round in acts of wanton aggression upon sentiments and opinions now forever left in their rear. Certain it is, that in their earlier stages of advance, especially in youthful minds, as yet untranquilized by long habituation to the world as it inevitably and eternally is; this aggressiveness is almost invariably manifested, and as invariably afterward deplored by themselves.
That amazing shock of practical truth, which in the compass of a very few days and hours had not so much advanced, as magically transplanted the youthful mind of Pierre far beyond all common discernments; it had not been entirely unattended by the lamentable rearward aggressiveness we have endeavored to portray above. Yielding to that unwarrantable mood, he had invaded the profound midnight slumbers of the Reverend Mr. Falsgrave, and most discourteously made war upon that really amiable and estimable person. But as through the strange force of circumstances his advance in insight had been so surprisingly rapid, so also was now his advance in some sort of wisdom, in charitableness; and his concluding words to Mr. Falsgrave, sufficiently evinced that already, ere quitting that gentleman’s study, he had begun to repent his ever entering it on such a mission.
And as he now walked on in the profound meditations induced by the hour; and as all that was in him stirred to and fro, intensely agitated by the ever-creative fire of enthusiastic earnestness, he became fully alive to many palliating considerations, which had they previously occurred to him would have peremptorily forbidden his impulsive intrusion upon the respectable clergyman.
But it is through the malice of this earthly air, that only by being guilty of Folly does mortal man in many cases arrive at the perception of Sense. A thought which should forever free us from hasty imprecations upon our ever-recurring intervals of Folly; since though Folly be our teacher, Sense is the lesson she teaches; since if Folly wholly depart from us, Further Sense will be her companion in the flight, and we will be left standing midway in wisdom. For it is only the miraculous vanity of man which ever persuades him, that even for the most richly gifted mind, there ever arrives an earthly period, where it can truly say to itself, I have come to the Ultimate of Human Speculative Knowledge; hereafter, at this present point I will abide. Sudden onsets of new truth will assail him, and over-turn him as the Tartars did China; for there is no China Wall that man can build in his soul, which shall permanently stay the irruptions of those barbarous hordes which Truth ever nourishes in the loins of her frozen, yet teeming North; so that the Empire of Human Knowledge can never be lasting in any one dynasty, since Truth still gives new Emperors to the earth.
But the thoughts we here indite as Pierre’s are to be very carefully discriminated from those we indite concerning him. Ignorant at this time of the ideas concerning the reciprocity and partnership of Folly and Sense, in contributing to the mental and moral growth of the mind; Pierre keenly upbraided his thoughtlessness, and began to stagger in his soul; as distrustful of that radical change in his general sentiments, which had thus hurried him into a glaring impropriety and folly; as distrustful of himself, the most wretched distrust of all. But this last distrust was not of the heart; for heaven itself, so he felt, had sanctified that with its blessing; but it was the distrust of his intellect, which in undisciplinedly espousing the manly enthusiast cause of his heart, seemed to cast a reproach upon that cause itself.
But though evermore hath the earnest heart an eventual balm for the most deplorable error of the head; yet in the interval small alleviation is to be had, and the whole man droops into nameless melancholy. Then it seems as though the most magnanimous and virtuous resolutions were only intended for fine spiritual emotions, not as mere preludes to their bodily translation into acts; since in essaying their embodiment, we have but proved ourselves miserable bunglers, and thereupon taken ignominious shame to ourselves. Then, too, the never-entirely repulsed hosts of Commonness, and Conventionalness, and Worldly Prudent-mindedness return to the charge; press hard on the faltering soul; and with inhuman hootings deride all its nobleness as mere eccentricity, which further wisdom and experience shall assuredly cure. The man is as seized by arms and legs, and convulsively pulled either way by his own indecisions and doubts. Blackness advances her banner over this cruel altercation, and he droops and swoons beneath its folds.
It was precisely in this mood of mind that, at about two in the morning, Pierre, with a hanging head, now crossed the private threshold of the Mansion of Saddle Meadows.
II.
IN the profoundly silent heart of a house full of sleeping serving-men and maids, Pierre now sat in his chamber before his accustomed round table, still tossed with the books and the papers which, three days before, he had abruptly left, for a sudden and more absorbing object. Uppermost and most conspicuous among the books were the Inferno of Dante, and the Hamlet of Shakspeare.
His mind was wandering and vague; his arm wandered and was vague. Soon he found the open Inferno in his hand, and his eye met the following lines, allegorically overscribed within the arch of the outgoings of the womb of human life:
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