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| Herman Melville
"Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to breakfast. ... 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. ... hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans. A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! all noble things are touched with that. A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.All men live enveloped in whale-lines. all are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever present perils of life. All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys. Art is the objectification of feeling. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. Call me Ishmael. Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored. Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor. Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. Flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight is said to be the only truth. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand! 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. 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. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married... Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg – a cosy, loving pair. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Heaven have mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence. Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity. How wondrous familiar is a fool! I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world. If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid. Ignorance is the parent of fear. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. Is he mad? anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks. Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone? It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. It is not down in any map; true places never are. Let america first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land. Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, – for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it – not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation. Life's a voyage that's homeward bound. Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. 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. No utter surprise can come to him Who reaches Shakespeare's core; That which we seek and shun is there – Man's final lore. Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed. Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Omen? omen? – the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honourably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion. The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method. There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath. There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man. There she blows! – there she blows! a hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick! They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. The dignity is in leisure. They think me mad – Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders. Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols. To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living. 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 that have tried it. To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness. Toward the accomplishment of an aim, which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgement, sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort. We cannot live only for ourselves. a thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects. Were this world an endless pain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, – it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches. Whatever fortune brings, don't be afraid of doing things. When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang. Where does the violet tint end and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blending enter into the other. So with sanity and insanity. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers. Yet habit – strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish? |
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