The Thing Itself

A friend recently mentioned a trip she had taken to Morocco, which reminded me of my trip to Morocco many years ago.

I was traveling alone, and my trip to Morocco began with a ride on the ferry from Algeciras, Spain across the strait to Tangier, Morocco. The weather was blustery, sunny, and very hazy, and the sea was choppy. I was leaning on the rail looking south towards Africa when I noticed through the haze in the distance off to my left a dense mass, like a mountain, jutting up from the ocean. It probably didn't take me but a matter of seconds to put two and two together and figure out what it had to be, but while I was working on the problem I experienced a moment of disorientation--that feeling of a rug being pulled out from under me--that I'll always remember. What I was seeing didn't match at all the only depiction I had ever seen of the Rock of Gibraltar: it did not bear the slightest resemblance to the logo of the Prudential Insurance Company.

As a boy, I had sometimes watched "The Twentieth Century," hosted by Walter Cronkite on Sunday afternoons and sponsored by Prudential. I'm not sure how the subject had come up back then, but I believe my father had explained to me that the big mountain-looking thing in the Prudential logo (although the word "logo" was unknown to us then) was the Rock of Gibraltar. Maybe he told me something else about it. I didn't give it much thought after that. But like everyone else, I saw the Prudential logo all around me as I grew up.

But the mountain I saw rising out of the sea in the distance through the haze as I rode the ferry didn't look anything like the Rock of Prudential. Prudential's graphic designers had picked just the right point of view for a very effective composition that has stood the test of time. But as I was looking toward the east, my point of view had been selected by no one. The shape the Rock presented to me was completely different from the Prudential logo, and I didn't recognize it at all.

I've thought often about that brief instant of mental vertigo I felt when I discovered the real Rock of Gibraltar. It still makes me squirm a little to remember my first glimpse of that giant, misshapen, hazy hulk that I was completely unprepared to recognize.

Prudential's logo today

There's a poem by Wallace Stevens entitled "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself." The title reminds me of my encounter with the Rock of Gibraltar, but the poem itself is completely beyond my comprehension. If you want to take a crack at it, you can find it here: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/not-ideas.html

By the way, in addition to being a serious poet, Wallace Stevens was a successful corporate lawyer and insurance company executive. But not for Prudential. He was a vice president specializing in investment banking for Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co.