Thursday, July 09, 2015
Both Right
Herman Melville (1819-1891), White-Jacket, chapter 28 (on the Commodore's Polynesian servant Wooloo):
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In our man-of-war, this semi-savage, wandering about the gun-deck in his barbaric robe, seemed a being from some other sphere. His tastes were our abominations: ours his. Our creed he rejected: his we. We thought him a loon: he fancied us fools. Had the case been reversed; had we been Polynesians and he an American, our mutual opinion of each other would still have remained the same. A fact proving that neither was wrong, but both right.
