/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11730419]

>But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. 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.
W-What the hell did Pip see?

[Anonymous No.11730434]

planet

[Anonymous No.11730465]

>>11730434
I have no idea where this meme came from, but i love it.

[Anonymous No.11730467]

>>11730419
jesus fucking christ that is good writing

And also a really good depiction of that experience 'so man's insanity is heaven's sense'

[Anonymous No.11730501]

>>11730419

[Anonymous No.11730510]

Divine mysteries, Melville intimates. He was close to death and so supposedly had a mystical perception reaching through to the very mechanics of the creation of the world and of the creator, making ordinary life seem completely stale and low compared to it.