The Daily Dick: Musing in a Time of Angst
From: The Nut "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 that flag which I fling half out to the world." Musing: Many people get lost in these chapters of Moby-Dick. Melville takes quite some time examining the head of a whale, comparing the heads of
The Daily Dick: Musing in a Time of Angst
From: The Blanket “Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it.” How can we not feel Ukraine? The pain of the people. The breaking of souls. A time of angst, indeed.
The Daily Dick: Musing in a Time of Angst
From: Brit "The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers." Musing: I rarely think of animated kid’s flicks, like An American Tail, but I do when the lyric in the song “Somewhere Out There” comes on: “
The Daily Dick: Musing in a Time of Angst
From The Spirit-Spout “And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.” Musing: As I noted, this time reading Moby-Dick I am really into the descriptions of Ahab, both physical and mental – and this line has both. The reason I find myself invested in Moby
The Daily Dick: Musing in a Time of Angst
From: The Spirit-Spout “It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow.” Musings: Nothing of grave consequence in the lines above. Just beauty. Most of what I love about Moby-Dick is the beauty of the w
The Daily Dick: Musing in a Time of Angst
From Surmises: “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.” Musing: Melville understands humankind. It’s hard to keep our eye on th
The Daily Dick: Musing in a Time of Angst
From The Chart “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: Today we follow Ahab to his quarters where he pulls out maps and
The Daily Dick: Musing in a Time of Angst
From Moby-Dick "[Ahab] morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.” Musing: By this chapter, we know that Ahab wants revenge on Moby-Dick for the taking of his leg. We read about the horribl
The Daily Dick: Musing in a Time of Angst
From Moby-Dick "Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.” Musing: I mean, come on. The
The Daily Dick: Musing in a Time of Angst
From: The Quarter-Deck "Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. " Musing: In this chapter, Ahab tells his crew they are hunting for Moby-Dick to avenge the loss of his leg. Starbuck, ever sensible, says the whale didn’t look to punish Ahab; he was simply acting as a whale – an animal. Ahab tells Starbuck that what he feels about being dismembered is what he sees in the white whale. Ahab gives Starbuck an opportunity to refute him, but Starbuck stays s
