![]() Nor did he warm to Reverend Wigglesworth’s sweet assurances that such a poor child would at least occupy one of the nicer rooms in hell!īut this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. The notion of infant damnation-the old Calvinist saw that a child not predestined for salvation who expired after a single breath was headed for hell-struck Taylor as horrific and implausible. He was repelled, however, by images of an angry, unkind God, a deity parsimonious with the gift of grace. Taylor never denied sin-he was, after all, an old salt who had lived aboard ship with all sorts of desperadoes and had prowled ports bursting with illicit pleasure palaces. He came of age theologically when old-school Calvinist doctrines of predestination, sin, and damnation were withering on the vine. By the time Melville might have heard him preach, Taylor was in his middle years, sturdy of jaw, solidly built, and beaming with goodwill, although he was more than capable of cutting sarcasm when the situation warranted it. Five years later, he was ordained a minister in the Methodist church. Drawn to the solid shore of religion, he was licensed to preach the gospel at the age of twenty-one. At the raw age of seven, he went to sea as a sailor. Few joyful presents came his way in his early years. Taylor was born in Richmond, Virginia on Christmas day 1793. Even with the backbreaking labor of his toil, Camus concludes that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Camus’s story of the demigod Sisyphus, punished to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, always to find it tumbling down anew, was not a resounding tragedy. Resignation he considered a form of suicide. He recognized the absurd nature of existence-the deep distance between our desires and the tricks played upon them by an indifferent reality. He embraced life, in all of its sensual pleasures and horrendous realities, its cherished dreams and chaotic contingencies. For Camus it was more of a protest-affirmation of pleasure over prudence. His yen for cigarettes could be seen as a suicidal wish. Chills and sweats, weakness and coughing fits wracked his body. Much of his adult life was spent chained to his tuberculosis-“my secret anguish,” he called it. He had known crushing poverty as a child. Camus decided against suicide, although he trembled at its compelling logic. ![]()
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