A Reader on Reading

For all these reasons, Jonah decided to escape both Nineveh and the Lord, and jumped on a ship headed for Tarshish. Now, the sailors in the ship that carried Jonah were all men from Joppa, a port not far from Nineveh, an outpost of the Ninevite empire. Nineveh was, as you have no doubt surmised, a society besotted by greed. Not ambition, which is a creative impulse, something all artists possess, but the sterile impulse to accumulate for the sake of accumulation. Joppa, however, had for many decades been a place where prophets had been allowed a tolerable amount of freedom. The people of Joppa accepted the yearly influx of bearded, ragged men and disheveled, wild-eyed women with a certain degree of sympathy, since their presence procured Joppa free publicity when the prophets traveled abroad to other cities, where they often mentioned the name of Joppa in not unkind terms. Also, the recurrent prophesying season brought curious and illustrious visitors to Joppa, and neither the innkeepers nor the owners of the caravanserais complained of the demands made on their bed and board.

But when times were hard in Nineveh and the economic hardships of the city rippled out all the way to the little town of Joppa, when business profits were down and the wealthy Joppites were constrained to sell one of their ornamented six-horse chariots or close down a couple of their upland sweatshops, then the presence in Joppa of the prophesying artists was openly frowned upon. The tolerance and whimsical generosity of wealthier days seemed now sinfully wasteful to the citizens of Joppa, and many of them felt that the artists who came to their quaint little haven should make no demands at all and feel grateful for whatever they got: grateful when they were lodged in the frumpiest buildings of Joppa, grateful when they were denied appropriate working tools, grateful when they were allowed to finance themselves their new projects. When they were forced to move out of their rooms to accommodate paying guests from Babylon, the artists were told to remember that they, as artists, should know that it was an honorable thing to lie under the stars wrapped in smelly goat hides just like the illustrious prophets and poets of the days before the Flood.

And yet even during those difficult times, most Joppites retained for the prophets a certain sincere fondness, somewhat akin to the affection we feel for old pets who have been around since our childhood, and they tried in several ways to accommodate them even when the going was not good, and attempted not to hurt their artistic sensibilities by being too blunt in their dealings. Thus it was that when the storm rose and the ship from Joppa was tossed by furious waves, the Joppite sailors felt uneasy, and hesitated before blaming Jonah, their artistic guest. Unwilling to take any drastic measures, they tried praying to their own gods, who they knew commanded the heavens and the seas — but with no visible results. In fact, the storm only got worse, as if the Joppite gods had other things to think about and were annoyed by the sailors’ whiny requests. Then the sailors appealed to Jonah (who was in the hold, sleeping out the storm, as artists sometimes do) and woke him and asked him for advice. Even when Jonah told them, with a touch of artistic pride, that the storm was all his fault, the sailors felt reluctant to toss him overboard. How much of a gale could one scraggy artist raise? How angry could one miserable prophet make the deep, wine-dark sea? But the storm grew worse, the wind howled through the riggings, the planks groaned and cried out when the waves hit them, and in the end, one by one, the sailors remembered the old Ninevite truisms, learned in Joppa at their grandmother’s knee: that all artists were, by and large, freeloaders, and that all Jonah and his ilk did all day was compose poems in which they kvetched about this and moaned about that, and said threatening things about the most innocent vices. And why should a society in which greed is the driving force support someone who does not contribute to the immediate accumulation of wealth? Therefore, as one of the sailors explained to his mates, don’t blame yourselves for bad seamanship, simply accept Jonah’s mea culpa and throw the bastard into the water. He won’t resist. In fact, he just about asked for it.

Now, even if Jonah had had second thoughts, and had argued that perhaps a ship, or a ship of state, could in fact do with a few wise prophecies to serve as ballast and keep it steady, the sailors had learned from long familiarity with Ninevite politicians the craft of turning a deaf ear to artistic warnings. Zigzagging their way across the oceans of the world in search of new lands on which to conduct free and profitable trade, the sailors assumed that whatever an artist might say or do, the weight of money would always provide a steadier ballast than any artistic argument.