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  Song for the Bankrupt Yachtsman   What did you do in the deluge, Daddy When the floods breathed together What did you do in the deluge, Daddy That you alone survived.   After forty days, insistently salt We huddled in the mouth of the moneyless wind Daddy at the wheel was faceless More than usually blind.   A seawrack strewn island before us A paradise of second chances! But why was Dad chosen and not I? I wondered, shaking out my kicks.

  A good hater – this is what Hazlitt called Cobbett. It is a wonderful phrase, worthy of a Pre-socratic sage – a good hater. The good is inimical, in any real system of the good, to hate. And yet if we admit hate as a motive – and how can we not – then we are enmeshed in a logic that distinguishes between the better and the worse. God, in Revelations, spits out the lukewarm. “ So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” Now, I am not the man to recommend Revelations. It is written in a bitter anti-Jesus spirit, and its acceptance by the Early Fathers as a canonical text was a dreadful mistake. I do admit, however, that it has its own poetry. In fact, in Western culture, it is perhaps the father of hatred literature, which tends to go grandly overboard and, if pursued with sufficient genius, rouses one up. This is how I understand certain uncomfortable figures, like Elias Canetti. In a great rant in Party in the Blitz, Canetti “