Uncle Schmuck2 - The Monday Morning Memo

“In James Michener’s 937-page epic novel, Hawaii, (1959) we hear rip-roaring, red-blooded, hell-raising, whaling captain Rafer Hoxworth tell his favorite grandson, ‘…what a man’s got to discover is that there’s no gain in loving a particular woman, it’s the idea of woman that you’re after.’

Three pages later, at the exact tipping point of this 937-page book, we read the conclusion of the old man’s instructions. “There was a moment of silence, and then Rafer said, ‘When Noelani’s mother died, she weighed close to four hundred pounds. Your great-grandmother. And every day her husband crawled into her presence on his hands and knees, bringing her flower chains. That’s a good thing for a man to do.’

A few hundred pages later in that same book we read of a pivotal moment in the life of Rafer Hoxworth’s grandson’s grandson, ‘…and as the palms toward the shore dipped toward the lagoon, Hoxworth Hale had a strikingly clear intuition: ‘From now on whenever I think of a woman, in the abstract… of womanliness, that is… I’ll see this brown-skinned Bora Bora girl, her sarong loosely about her hips, working coconut and humming softly in the shadowy sunlight. Has she been here, under these breadfruit trees, all these last empty years?” And he had a second intuition: that during the forthcoming even emptier years, she would still be there, a haunting vision of the other half of life, the womanliness, the caretaking symbol, the majestic, lovely, receptive other half.”

- Roy H. Williams

More Information

Contact Us

Address