whale watching

This post isn’t about real whale watching, but I have one small anecdote about that. I did go on a whale-watching trip in Iceland in 2006, and saw no whales. The company offers a free ticket for a new trip in those cases (it was maybe $50 or $60 to ride that boat), so I requested the free ticket. On my second trip, I again saw no whales. The company published percentages of the chances of seeing whales on any given trip, and using those numbers I calculated that there was only about a 1 in 2,000 chance of not seeing any whales near Reykjavik on two consecutive trips. But maybe the numbers were inflated. I didn’t request another ticket, though, because that was my last day in Iceland and I knew it might be many years before I returned.

What this post is really about is Whitehead. I think it was Isabelle Stengers who compared reading Whitehead to whale watching, and the comparison is perfect. Whitehead ambles along in his prose like a dry, understated, well-bred English gentleman of the old school, but then once in awhile– a whale jumps out! A brilliant little sentence that sheds more light on the nature of philosophy than volumes written by others.

It’s actually not quite as rare as seeing a whale leap from the sea. In his introductory chapter of around 12 pages, I think I marked 7 absolutely brilliant sentences. I should actually quote them all here, but at the moment don’t feel like going back and looking for them. Maybe later.