{"id":7866,"date":"2008-03-18T07:49:18","date_gmt":"2008-03-18T11:49:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=7866"},"modified":"2015-05-11T10:07:15","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T14:07:15","slug":"the-books-moby-dick-herman-melville-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=7866","title":{"rendered":"The Books: \u201cMoby Dick\u201d (Herman Melville)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:<\/p>\n

Moby Dick<\/i><\/a>\"\" by Herman Melville – fourth excerpt.<\/p>\n

\"0679725253.jpg\"Reading the chapter called “The Blanket” was one of the truly profound moments of my life. I’ll never forget it. I put the book down after reading it, and lay on my bed, just thinking about my life, and my behavior, and my mistakes, and my character, and “The Blanket” just surged through me – almost showing me “the way” to live. I’ll never forget it. I remember parts of that chapter by heart. I read it often. I take out Moby Dick<\/i> and read just “The Blanket”, in order to remind me, to get me back into that contemplative place of growth, and striving for self-knowledge. It also, to me, has a lot to do with forgiveness. Forgiveness of your own struggle – because we, as humans, of course, are NOT great white whales … we do NOT have a “blanket” around us at all times … but we must strive to create one. We must imitate the whale. The whale can teach us how to live, if we let it. Moby Dick<\/i> is one of the few books I can think of that actually gave me some precepts<\/i> on how to live. There are many books that accurately describe<\/i> an experience – so much so that I forever refer back to that particular book in my mind, when such an experience comes up in my own life. The ending of Tess of the D’Urbervilles<\/i> (excerpt here<\/a>) has a sentence (and dammit, I can’t find it right now – I was sure it was in the last Stone Henge chapter, but I can’t find it) – and the jist of it is: that Tess has an experience of happiness and peace in that chapter, after all of her agonies – and now that she has been so beaten by life, so damaged – the happiness which comes is now so tainted with the pain that came before, that it is really the end of the road for her. My apologies to Hardy for my awkward rendering of his brilliant paragraph which I can’t find! Anyway, I have had many moments in this last rough year where I have thought of Thomas Hardy’s sentence … and it has felt<\/i> true to me. When I was 25, 26, I was fit for love – meaning: optimistic, vivacious, young, a bit fearless … but I wasn’t ready<\/i>. And now that I’m ready, I feel like I am no longer fit<\/i>. Life has done a number on me and made me cautious, self-conscious, depressive, and fearful. If happiness came now – would my experience of it be like Tess’? I don’t know – it’s a bleak thought, and I don’t mean to get bleak before 8 in the morning … it’s just something I’ve been thinking about. How fit-ness and ready-ness often do not come at the same moment in time. And Hardy perfectly<\/i> articulates that (and if I could only find the sentence … bah!!) But with “The Blanket”, Herman Melville does way way more than articulate an experience accurately: he describes to us the whale’s skin – its “blanket” that basically allows the whale to swim in the Arctic Ocean as well as the tropics … without freezing or boiling … and Melville uses the blanket as a launching-off place for a philosophical, almost spiritual rumination – and he calls out, almost in desperation, in ecstasy, to those of us who might be reading – and begs something of us. He begs us to listen, to heed, to imitate, to, above all things, go deep<\/i>. It is one of those chapters that you might easily miss if you were bored with the cetology sections. But it changed my life. Not the outer aspects of my life – but the inner. I reference “The Blanket” in my mind all the time – when I am in an unfamiliar situation, feeling insecure, and like I want to flee … sometimes I’ll remind myself: “Remember what Melville said in ‘The Blanket’. Breathe … breathe …” It reminds me to keep a quiet still center for myself – even around hostile elements, or unfamiliar elements … I know who Sheila is, right? No one can take that away from me, no one can tell me who I am … but it takes work – it takes work to isolate that center, to keep it safe, to not let anyone in there who doesn’t deserve to be in there. I must strive to always<\/i> be “at home”, wherever I am. Melville’s chapter is a reminder, like I said. It’s truly amazing. Soul-stirring. Reading that last paragraph of the excerpt below still has the power to bring me to tears.<\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt.<\/p>\n


\nEXCERPT FROM Moby Dick<\/i><\/a>\"\" by Herman Melville – fourth excerpt. <\/b><\/p>\n

Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale’s skin.<\/p>\n

In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs – I should say, that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large, full- grown bulls of the species.<\/p>\n

A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the north, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it then – except after explanation – that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer.<\/p>\n

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. 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.<\/p>\n