/lit/ - Literature

>By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. 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.

>>17861900
>Though I have written the gospel in this century, I will die in the gutter.

>>15353875
I'm behind, just starting and trying to read 5-10 chapters a day. I've read it before, and this time around I often find little asides that catch my attention, (almost like I'm getting a chance to look at the background of a painting, or the details of a set in a movie) and I was wondering if any anons had any thoughts about this paragraph...

>In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation’s final day.

It's from chapter 6: The Street

specifically drawn to the part "So omnipotent is art," on to the end of the paragraph. What exactly is he saying here? Even from the barren rocks tossed aside at creation's final day, even the the forgotten things bring forth flowers, beauty,etc.? I find it interesting to reflect on how this might fit with the views of creation, the whale, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and the like which are wrestled with later on. Any thoughts?

>>15250180
Continuing into the extracts, they begin with Genesis, "And God created great whales" and they end with texts contemporaneous to the publication of Moby-Dick. The whale is known in all tongues, in all eras, indefinite and unknown, like God. It has been there since the beginning of creation, a watery brother, yet man barely knows it.

>“In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed: there—pointing to the sea—is a green pasture where our children’s grand-children will go for bread.” —Obed Macy’s History of Nantucket.
This extract speaks to that importance of whaling economically, and in a prophetic way. Nantucket, the hub of a booming 19th century product that people used in their homes and in various products. Could it draw a comparison to the Eucharist with the bread imagery as well?

I may post more thoughts about specific extracts, but I think the major point is a preparation and legitimization of the subject. Whales do not have to be the subject of lowbrow adventure tales. They have been subjects of great poetry, history, science, and holy scripture.

>>14778362
Baroque Shakespearean prose with greco-roman allusions on the surface masking deep Biblical allegory and metaphor underneath, heavily inspired by the prominent English language essayists of the 17th and 18th century like Burton, De Quincey and Lamb.

Hitchcock said, "The better the villain, the better the picture." Moby-Dick has a villain so good he almost subsumes the role of hero and villain in the same novel.

>>14232009
>Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.

>Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed - while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms.

What the fuck was his problem? Every word from this man's pen was liquid gold.