MDDM Comparing Wicks and Ishmael as American Comedy & Tragedy

[Terrance]

We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was
so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that
there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to
enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is
no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.
Nothing exists in itself.
M-D, Ch.11 Nightgown

Doubt defines Faith and is the essence of Christ, warm defines cold, the
civilized world the savage, the savage our civility, the other defines
our selves.  Ishmael discovers, not by thinking linear or by drawing
straight lines
but by circularity, that ideas do not exist and can not
exist less they be expressed and that to give expression to ideas with
language is to step toward the silence, the impersonal, the voiceless,
what consecrates the universe (Mardi) and that after silence there is
humor, despair, Cool and Care. There can be no humor, no humor sublime,
no sublime American Comedy, in itself, but must always be in bed with
its difference-despair and Tragedy.