★★★★★ | Literature | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A close reading of this classic with the #Booktwitter group. I read this in college, and while I finished it, I wasn’t quite sure what I had read. This time, having many decades to reflect on it, and benefitting from the expert notes of my fellow readers, and understanding better the brutal facts of mortality and existence, I drank this in, entranced. Maybe this one is only meant to be read later in life.
When I feel that “damp, drizzly November in my soul,” I’ll return once more to this incredible novel.
Favorite Quotes
If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very ever that nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.
Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass-the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.
Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
… a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let hìm not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way.
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
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.
A man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.
It’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one.
But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he’would find out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.
“Aye, aye! and I’II chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.”
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.
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. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.
He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, multum in parvo, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior-though a little swelled-of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also screwdrivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were.
To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft-cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birthmark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
But let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there’s time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket!
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; 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.
I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though.
Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled.