The Books: “Moby Dick” (Herman Melville)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Moby Dick by Herman Melville – second excerpt.

Scrolling through the book, I find myself getting caught up in it again. Most of the chapters are short – 4 or 5 pages – so there’s a fragmentary aspect to the novel. Like I said in my first post, there is no real plot – and the Ahab story takes a while to get going. For the first half of the novel, Melville immerses us in whaling – with extraordinarily poetic chapters on Nantucket, on the different members of the crew – Starbuck gets his own chapter, many of the crew people do – the parts of the ship (each getting its own chapter) – and of course – breaking down the whale into its many parts, the cetology chapters which are so daunting (and so boring) to many – including myself when I first read it. I changed my tune in the re-reading – and never wanted the book to end. Melville, you want to write 3 pages on a soup pot? Go for it? 4 pages on a pillow? I got your back, man. These are not just factual chapters, although there is a journalistic feel to much of it. “Here is what THIS part of the ship is for, and here is how it works …” But then … but then … inevitably, he goes deeper, or higher – however you want to look at it. Everything is either a metaphor for something else – or a launching-pad for Melville’s philosophical, spiritual, and emotional ruminations. I suppose if you found this kind of stuff tiresome, and just wanted the story to start, dammit – then all of this would be nearly unbearable. I know I did, in high school. It is one of the most obsessive books ever written. Maybe Finnegans Wake rivals it (excerpt here). But it really has no peers. Melville is obsessed with his topic. He doesn’t want to leave anything out. So the book goes from here to there … characters, events, to marine biology, to nautical explanations … and behind all of it, is a deep flowing mystery – it haunts the reader. You ask yourself: Why? Why is he so obsessed? What will this add up to? And it is when you give up those questions, that the book really starts to come alive. EM Forster touched on this in the excerpt I gave in the first post. There are no answers, or easy solutions. A does not lead to B. Melville is doing something else, entirely – and I am not even going to try to articulate what it is. All I know is: he is obsessed. With the meaning BEHIND the meaning – and he goes at it in a fragmentary manner, not giving the reader a chance to ponder too much on the grander structure he might be going for … No. Because if you look for the grander structure, the uber-story, the “why”s of the thing – you will miss the moment. In reading the Master & Commander books, which I am doing right now, there’s quite a lot of talk about time – and how time is different when you are at sea, on a boat, far from land. The boat is the universe. Concerns for what’s happening on land drift away. You lose perspective. Melville, in his creation of Ahab, is obviously interested in that aspect of nautical life – the almost disorienting feel of life at sea, and how whatever is going on with a human being either becomes amplified or disappears completely. Ahab has ZERO distractions. All he does is obsess over the whale. There is nothing else to take his focus – not a bit of land, nothing – just endless ocean. Melville also addresses this disorientation to a haunting degree with the chapter on Pip going mad – after his time alone in the ocean, before being picked up by the boat again. I can’t remember right now how long Pip was in the water – but it wasn’t long. And by the time the boat picked him up, poor Pip had snapped. Whatever it was he had seen, sensed, experienced – in the endless waves – had made him go mad. There is nothing to pull the eye, nothing to “ground” you (literally and metaphorically) – and Pip is “dazzled” into a state of silent madness. It’s terrifying.

Here, in his chapter on The Mast-Head (which comes way before the Pip chapter) – Melville discusses the dangers of the sea – not the obvious dangers of storms, and big waves, and scurvy, and Leviathans … but the danger of staring out into that endlessness for too long – and losing yourself entirely. Experienced sailors know to avoid such things, to keep busy, to lose oneself not in the ocean – but in the daily tasks of keeping the universe of the ship going. Don’t get too reflective or introspective. Because there is nothing “out there” that will bring you back to earth. You are in a ship, on a heaving endless ocean. You’re on your own.

Melville is a master. Watch how he starts with specifics here – how the mast-heads are manned, etc. – and by the end, he has launched off into another tone entirely – one almost of spiritual ecstasy and agony – a warning, to those on mast-head duty, the problems of the job – not just practical problems, but existential. The sea is not to be looked at head-on. It will shatter your sense of self. Be warned.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville – second excerpt.

The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun- set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner – for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.

In one of those southern whalemen, on a long three or four years’ voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t’ gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t’ gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull’s horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshly tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.

Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called crow’s-nests, in which the lookouts of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In the fire-side narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled “A Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;” in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented crow’s-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet’s good craft. He called it the Sleet’s crow’s-nest, in honor of himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet’s crow’s-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is furnished with a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your head in a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow’s nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray Narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed conveniences of his crow’s-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a small compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called the “local attraction” of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship’s planks, and in the Glacier’s case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned “binnacle deviations,” “azimuth compass observations,” and “approximate errors,” he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his crow’s nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird’s nest within three or four perches of the pole.

But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his Greenland-men were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counterbalanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I – being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude, – how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes !n asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent- minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates: – “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.” Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.

“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly- discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!