"After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case may be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault." Musing: Ishmael has just survived being flung out of a boat during a whale chase and decides to write his will. He feels as if he has been given a second chance. Little does he know he w
"Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men’s cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.- On deck!” Musing: Brilliant writing! Starbuck has just challenged the authority of Ahab. For the first time in all my readings of Moby Dick I see how brave that challenge was of Starbuck. Starbuck only backs down because of the gun. Ahab gets the gun because he has no other way to respond to Starbuck's threat. And the religious analogy must have really taken Starbuck (and readers) by surprise! Things are getting good!
Ahab: "Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away? Carpenter: Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something curious on that score; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir? Ahab: It is, man. Look, put thy live leg he
"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own." Musing; Here is Ishmael in full voice. The men on board The Pequod have just come back from trying to catch a whale. There was a bit of a scare and Ishmael was knocked out of the boat. When given time to ponder life, Ishmael is a philosopher. I don't know if anyone else has ever felt this way before - on or off a boat - but surely the situations life throws at us seem, at times, part of a grand comical scene where the gods ar
"Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both tie ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy." Musing: Ahab has cracked his stump. When he cracked his wooden leg, a shard of wood pierced his skin and caused pain. Ahab considers how pain (the loss of his leg) can
"One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? [ . . . ] Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it." Musing: This is a much quoted line from Moby Dick. I am guessing that writers love this idea. I do. The big point for me is the truth in this passage. "We expand" to the bulk of our themes. If we write throw-away books, what are we? In this passage, it seems, that Melville is sayin
"How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untraveled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely pouring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out." Musing: I love this passage in light of our virtual preferences and the plethora of travel shows on television. It is one thing to see an image and quite another to touch-smell-taste a thing. Ishmael says, at the start of Moby Dick, that he never goes to sea as a passenger because "passengers get sea-sick -
"But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air." Musing: It is easy to forget that Moby Dick also contains a bit of a mystery within its pages. Remember the prophet Elijah from the beginning of the book? He tells Ishmael that other men have already boarded the ship, but Ishmael sees no one else on board. Ishmael believes Elijah is crazy, but as soon as Tashtego calls out that a whale has been sighted, these five "dusky phantoms" come out of hiding. Who are they? Why are they with Ahab? What is their role in the book? Do they fun
"So strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads." Musing: If that last line doesn't take your breath away I am not sure what
"For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object- that final and romantic object, too many would have turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash- aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon cashier Ahab." Musing: So much to look at in t
"To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain." Musing: Damn, that first line gives me chills. And now I know why we call some people tools! But think about what is being said - Ahab k
"The Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale has done it." Musing: This is a tricky part of the book for me. Ishmael does a great job of describing Ahab's growing madness. Ahab is aligned with Prometheus and linked to fire. We believe Ahab is mad. What whale would purposefully hurt one man in particular? What revenge could Ahab even exact against a dumb whale? But in this chapter, and others, Ishmael tells us that it could happen. A whale could knowingly come after a person. So if that is the case - that Moby Dick went after Ahab i
"So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory." Musing: Oh how I love this line! Most critics say things like this: "Melville's most famous novel, “Moby-Dick” presents an allegorical story of humanity's dangerous search for meaning. In the book, 'meaning' is represented by Moby Dick, a monstrous white whale pursued by the maniacal Captain Ahab." In the passage from the novel, Melville himself seems to be winking at us. Take this boo
"But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual celebrity- nay, you may call it an oceanwide renown; not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar." Musing: The idea of naming is something worth studying in Moby Dick. First, Ishmael. The connotation of that name, biblically speaking, is that of an orphan, or a social outcast, or an exile. When Ishmael is rescued, it is by a ship called The Rachel. Rachel lost her sons, who were exiled, and Melville's Rachel finds a son. The list of symbolic names goes on
"And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him! and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms." Musing: The Chart is a dark chapter! In this scene, Ahab is shown pouring over maps and charts trying to find one white whale in the seemingly infinite waters of our world. Melville, through Ishmael, describes how the torment of fixation can consume a person. The description of the tormented Ahab is rich and the phras
"Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates." Musing: Here, Ahab is linked to Prometheus - another fire image. Prometheus is the dude who stole fire from the gods to give it to mankind and is then tortured forever by the gods for the theft. Promet
"Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, [ . . . ] and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire." Musing: This line 'when this hell in himself yawned beneath him,' always takes me back to Milton and Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place, and in it
"While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead." Musing: Ahab is in his cabin perusing the charts and maps. The language in this section is blow-me-away amazing. Ahab is a map that we are learning to read. How great is this for character building!
"And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within [ . . .] And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?" Musing: Here it is. Melville lays it out -the white whale could represent death or the rage against death or e
"Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?" Musing: Damn. This is deep stuff. This is the reason people hate this book. More action - less thinking! But for me, this resonates. This chapter talks about the power of wh
