Great Paper: "Moby dick" by Herman Melville ~Life like the Ocean~

Great Paper: Moby Dick By Herman Melville

~Life like the Ocean~

The crew of the Pequod sail the ocean blue. From the shores of nantucket massachusets, they lifted anchor and set fowarth into the great beyonds of the North Atlantic sea. In search of whales, and the ever elusive legendary white whale, Moby Dick, the crew scoured the tumulted surfaces of the land of waves for miles and miles looking for any signs of the blubbery giants that lurked below. Life for a whaleman is a waiting game as much as it is a game of chase. There can’t be promise for any reward at all until the reward itself has been spotted. And in this passage, a game of waiting is precisely what is being played. Waiting and searching for something. Searching and waiting for something to be found. But on the ocean, the mind can become altered by the properties of the landless waves. As the Author describes to the reader how the tides can hypnotize the mind, and ensnare the sailors thoughts and dreams within the context of its watery prisms. Take a look at the passage below, and you can almost imagine exactly what types of dreams the ocean has these sailors dreaming. 

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"And Haroldo Chidle, from a perch atop the mast-head, ejaculated to the daytime crew, “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber hunters sweep over thee in vain.” 

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see the whales otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; that they are shortsighted; what use then, to strain the visual nerve?  

“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooner to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising now hard three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are as scarce as hens teeth whenever thou art up there.”  

Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some indiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. 

In this enchanted mood thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer’s sprinkled Panthiestic ashes, forming at last  part of every shore the round globe over.  

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by the a gently rolling ship; by her, burrowed from the sea, by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch;slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!"

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