The train to Edinburgh, up the east coast. We sit on the right hand side of the carriage for the view and are cheered when we see the expanse of the North Sea. We should toast the ocean!, W. says, but they don't sell Plymouth Gin in the restaurant car. What are we to do?
W. reads to me from his notebook. A rabbi, a real cabbalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this brush or this stone just a little, and thereby everything. Two plastic cups of Plymouth Gin would usher in the reign of peace, he's sure of it, W. says.
He doesn't really know the North Sea, W. says. He doesn't really feel it. What lies across the water, for instance? He doesn't even know that … Denmark, I tell him. Travel east, and we'd reach Jutland, and the port of Esbjerg. Denmark! That's where the Vikings came from, W. says. – 'Your people, pillaging and marauding …'
The Vikings: haven't I always maintained they've been misunderstood by history - that they a melancholy people, restless only because of their life-disgust, because of their overwhelming sense of the futility of life? Haven't I extolled to W. Viking heavy-souledness, which drove them to the New World, of course, settling in Newfoundland, but also southwards down the coast of present-day North America, all the way to what became Mexico?
And didn't they follow the coast of Africa almost all the way down, being defeated only by the terrible seas of the Cape of Good Hope? There were Vikings in Constantinople, of course, when it was the capital of the Orthdox world. A contingent of melancholic Viking longshipmen were part of the imperial guard …
And didn't the Viking carry their flat-bottomed longships overground to reach the Red Sea and then the Indian ocean? Weren't there Viking settlements along the edge of East Africa? And aren't there pockets of India where blue-eyed, heavy-souled natives claim ancestry from lost Danish colonies?
No gin, so we settle for cans of Stella from the trolley. To the sea!, we toast, banging our cans together. To the sea, as the dusk falls, the drafts of our collaborative paper on our laps …
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