Island of the Manhattoes

BEFORE

*

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs — commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see? — Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster — tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

*

AFTER

So I read to myself
A chance of a lifetime to see new horizons
On the front page
A black and white picture of
Manhattan Skyline

Quentin Skinner on Freedom

A couple of weeks ago I got the chance to have dinner with Quentin Skinner, a very interesting political philosopher who just had a collection of essays (on Arbitrary Power, a central concept in his thinking, as far as I understand) published in Norwegian, at Res Publica.

Skinner turned out to be not just the erudite-font-of-wisdom kind of person you expect from these international philosopher of mystery types, he was also quite possibly the nicest and most polite person I've ever met. They just don't make Cambridge alumni like they used to.

The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation has put a talk he gave here in Norway online. The talk, which I haven't heard all the way through yet (I may post on it when I have) is very interesting. It deals with the history of the concept of freedom and tries to place a "third" concept of freedom between the Hobbes-Mill-Berlin dialectic between "positive" and "negative" freedom. It's well worth listening to. Even if you're not interested in these things, Skinner's diction alone is worth the price of admission.