Previous - 88. A simple plan
Absalom
Last night I was writing about eudaimonia and the daemon (Aristotle and Socrates) and today I run into this passage, "... 'he [Quentin's grandfather] said how Sutpen was talking about it [how Sutpen ended up in Mississippi] again, telling him again before he realized that this was some more of it, and he said how he thought there was something about a man's destiny (or about the man) that caused the destiny to shape itself to him like his clothes did, like the same coat that new might have fitted a thousand men, yet after one man has worn it for a while it fits no one else and you can tell it anywhere you see it even if all you see is a sleeve or a lapel: so that his -- ' ('the demon's,' Shreve said) ' -- destiny had fitted itself to him, to his innocence, his pristine aptitude for platform drama and childlike heroic simplicity...' "So is Faulker using "demon" in the sense of Socrates's daemon? Kind of looks like it. And isn't this book the story of Sutpen's seeking his eudaimonia?
Umbrella
We've been having a spell of mild weather, a little cold but no rain for a while. So when I went to get my umbrella before going out today I was surprised to find it not in any of the usual places -- and there aren't that many places I would put it. I left with my back-up umbrella while trying to remember where I might have left it. There were two places I recalled putting it down and being concerned I wouldn't remember to collect it before I left. My (new) plan was to have lunch at my favorite pizzeria and then walk over the hill to the theater that was at the top of my list.At lunch -- I'm still here -- I got to chatting with the proprietor who has been here almost as long as I've been eating here (20 years for her, 23+ for me). Since I am here a lot, I asked if they had a lost and found and described my umbrella. There was another restaurant on my short list, but this wasn't it. She found it!
Since it's the nicest umbrella I've ever owned (corporate shwag from the Bank Cafe), I'm delighted.
Maybe this was karma. Yesterday I went walking with a friend who had seen some public art she wanted to photograph while being driven home from the airport by a taxi driver, taking what she described as a bizarre route. My first thought was the convoluted Pennsylvania to 7th Street, I-280 bypass I learned while I was driving a cab (16 years ago now?). Sure enough, the sculpture she had seen was where that route makes an odd jag -- because Pennsylvania and 7th don't quite connect. In fact, the cab driver was taking her by a really brilliant route that even I wouldn't have thought of before.
Because today is December 7th, the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, the accounts of the few remaining U.S. survivors have been in the news. I listened to two of them (the second one I couldn't finish, he had clearly told the tale too many times and whatever the fish had looked like originally, it was now a Leviathan). The first survivor had been on the battleship U.S.S. Pennsylvania (rumour has it Pennsylvania and the other "state" streets in that neighborhood of SF are actually named after battleships. The order of the streets don't seem to match the order the battleships were built, but that's not definitive proof the tale isn't true.)
I've read accounts of all the other battleships at Pearl Harbor but I don't recall ever hearing about the Pennsylvania. She was unique because she was sitting in dry dock on that Sunday. I hadn't realized she was fully manned -- I thought maybe her crew had been ashore while the ship was being worked on. But no.
The Pennsylvania and Arizona were sister ships (Pennsylvania class), and therefore competitive. (While they had been the newest and most powerful U.S. battleships when the U.S. entered WW1, they didn't join the Grand Fleet because they were oil, not coal, fired -- I just learned this.) One ship (I think the Pennsylvania, had won a band competition the previous night so the other was determined to win the football game scheduled for that Sunday. Our survivor was on the football team and had already suited up when the attack started. He had to climb to his battle station in the crow's nest -- way up there on these ships at this time -- with his pads still on.
The Pennsylvania was damaged by a bomb during the attack and two destroyers sharing the dry dock at the time, were virtually destroyed.
But the crew fought the ship just as they would have if they had been in the water. At least they didn't have to worry about sinking, though the magazine explosion that happened to Arizona could just as easily have happened to them.
There were four classes of battleships at Pearl Harbor that day, but two of the classes were very similar so we can say there were two old Nevada class ships, the U.S. Navy's first super-dreadnoughts; two Colorado class ships the most powerful and newest battleships present, mounting eight 16" rifles each; and the remaining four similar battleships, each bristling with twelve 14" rifles in four triple turrets. The Pennsylvania and Tennessee layout was a great look, that would have returned in he late 1940s had the Montana class ever been built.
While all these ships -- except for the shattered Arizona and the side-less Oklahoma -- went on to contribute to the war effort in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, all these ships were already obsolete on that December 7th morning with the brand new USS North Carolina and USS Washington already in service in the Atlantic. None of the Pearl Harbor battleships had the speed to escort aircraft carriers. Even during the dark days of mid-1942, what had been the U.S. Navy's "Battle Fleet" was held in reserve out of range of IJN carrier aviation. (The Oklahoma was hit by five torpedoes on the same side before she could seal up her internal spaces. She turned turtle and sank. She was re-floated to clear the mooring position but was only used as a sort of floating warehouse during the war. The story of her re-floating is well told in Morison's history of the war)
The Navy was clever in making only essential changes to these older battleships during the war. Some of the ships that were most damaged on December 7th lost those towering crows nests and ended up looking almost modern with a profile more like North Carolina class ships and radar. The Pennsylvania kept her forward crows nest but gained modern twin 5" dual purpose turrets instead of the old single 5" guns in her hull. In one of the more famous photographs from late in the war she can be seen leading a line of other old battleships with her decks bristling with these new secondary batteries.
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