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/lit/ - Literature

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13183909 No.13183909 [Reply] [Original]

>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.
How the fuck did he do it lads?

>> No.13183914

>>13183909
>Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish. With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!

Why was this a commercial flop when it first came out? Why didn't it propel Melville to instant stardom?

>> No.13183987

>>13183909
how can non-Christians even compete?

>> No.13184026

>>13183909
You might like Clarence’s dream vision in Richard III, very similar unnerving images

>> No.13184546
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13184546

>>13183987
they can't

>> No.13184791

>>13183914
I think of that meself every damn day

>> No.13184833

>>13183914
Because he was American. Moby Dick was a moderate success in the UK, and then the Brits rediscovered him in the 20th century and gave him the acclaim he deserved. Transcendentalism was also mocked in the U.S. At the time.

It makes me wonder how many other lost masterpieces there are waiting to be discovered. There might be a manuscript better than Moby Dick collecting dust in an attic somewhere.