Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  Jack London - Image from here For the 1 st part of this, click here . Wolf Larsen, the protagonist of Jack London’s novel The Sea Wolf , is a devil for all practical purposes. He can be ruthlessly cruel if he wants. He can engage you in an intellectual conversation about morality or literature when he is in the mood for that. He can throw one of his crew into the ocean just because his shirt stinks. When that man loses a foot to a shark in the ocean before being pulled aboard, Larsen can shrug his shoulders saying that the shark was not in his control or plan. What makes Wolf Larsen a charming devil is his brutal honesty. He knows that life has no purpose other than prolong itself as much as it can. “You have no fictions, no dreams, no ideals,” the narrator tells Wolf. It is fictions, dreams, and ideals that constitute nobility. We would all be subhuman brutes without our fictions, dreams, and ideals. Add Wolf’s brutal honesty to that and we would be heartless devils. What...

Wolf Larsen as imagined by Gemini AI Book Chat “Good-bye, Lucifer, proud spirit.” Maud Brewster pays her tribute to the dying Wolf Larsen, protagonist of Jack London’s novel The Sea Wolf (1904). Wolf is not Larsen’s real name. He got that name because of his inhuman personality traits. Maud Brewster calls him Lucifer and he might as well be that proud but fallen angel. Larsen lives totally outside normal human conventions. He is the captain of a ship named Ghost . It is a seal-hunting schooner. Larsen is an absolute dictator on the ship and the entire novel takes place on that ship except a couple of chapters towards the end. (And those few chapters are rather boring.) Might is right for Larsen. He is a staunch follower of the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest. Fitness, for Larsen, is physical and it has nothing to do with the intellect and least of all with morality. Morality is a mere human construct, he argues, made for the safety of the weak. “Might is right, ...

  Caliban The devil is a far more interesting character than god in the Bible and quite a lot of Christian literature like Paradise Lost . He is authentic. His authenticity makes him rebel against god who is a bombastic and whimsical character. The devil’s problem, however, is not with god’s self-conceit and capriciousness. His problem is why he should endure all that and remain a slave to such an entity. The devil has self-respect and wants to assert his individuality and dignity. Hierarchical systems don’t like people with self-respect and individuality. Human beings love to create hierarchies. Our gods sit at the top of all our hierarchies and they are as hideous entities as the creators of our hierarchies. Our gods are the supernatural projections of our leaders. In other words, our gods are created in the images of our leaders who create our hierarchies. Our leaders obviously know how to make use of these gods for various purposes: political as well as others. You can brin...

Point Nemo is the loneliest place on earth. It is a point in the Pacific Ocean, about 2,688 kilometres from the nearest land. If you can get a foothold in Point Nemo, what you see all around you will be water and nothing but water, leaving aside the sky above. Water, sky and you. What greater solitude can you ask for? Maybe Henry Miller would be happy there as he could ponder his ‘shame and his despair’ in seclusion. He wanted to do that, according to his Tropic of Cancer , in the vacant sunshine, without companions, without conversation, face to face with himself, with only the music of his heart for company. Maybe Virginia Wolf could be her own real self, sitting by herself “like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake.” Lord Byron can find his bliss there. Though it is not the “pathless woods” that he longed for. But the rapture he wanted so much on “the lonely shore” might come by. “There is society, where none intrudes, / By the deep sea, and music in its r...