![]() ![]() ![]() Anxiety is elevated and discipline harsh aboard the ship, for it is just a few months since the mutinies of the Spithead and the Nore. Near the opening of Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), the great moral parable and political allegory left unfinished at Herman Melville's death in 1891, the naive and good-hearted merchant sailor Billy Budd, a so-called Handsome Sailor whose one "imperfection" is a liability to stutter under the stress of "sudden provocation," is pressed into service aboard the Bellipotent, a massive warship fighting against the fleet of the French Directory in the summer of 1797 under the command of the strict but upright Captain Edward Vere. ![]() I don't think that the real questions of this century will get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing. You know the left think that I am a conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I suppose I never had any such position. I really don't know and I've never known. ![]()
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