"Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe." (299)
One image that I reach to whenever I doubt my ability to create is that of wild sea-foam horses charging into the beach from the sea. I like the mad battle steed better.
"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!" (299)
I am amazed at how connected with himself Melville is...
"... it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale boat, you would not a heart feel one white more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side." (307)
This is oddly comforting, to think that perhaps in our heights and terrors of emotions, one man does not differ much from the other.
"Oh man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter's! Of creatures how few vast as the whale! " (334-335)
I only hope that I can be vast enough to absorb your teachings...
"But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of Cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all. -- Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind? Subtilize it." (362)
Yes. Anyone can think big thoughts, but the profound ones can grasp the subtle microscopic nuances. I wonder if I am profound? I suppose you can't really know that. It's hard to discern between flattery and sincerity.
"For I believe that much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of the flag which I fling half out to the world" (382)
*straightens her back*
"By merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world gilded to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. " (453-454)
Pip, the little cabin boy, is lost at sea for an hour, and when he comes back is mad. I can imagine madness like this.
"But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain" (i.e. even while living) "in the congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar." (465)
Thank you Dr. Richards for pointing this passage out to us in class. It implies that having a goal, a purpose, an obsession is sometimes better, or at least more noble and awe inspiring (even if you fail) than if you have no greater purpose at all.
Mellville, Herman. Moby Dick, or The Whale. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.
This series of posts dedicated to Dr. Richards.
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