These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks – the Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist.
He’s killed himself,” she cried. “It’s unfort’nate Stiggs done over again there goes another counterpane – God pity his poor mother! – it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad a sister? Where’s that girl? – there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, with – “no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;” – might as well kill both birds at once.
Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair.
Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?
Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck.
Dough-boy’s whole life was one continual lip-quiver.
There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.
Often ill comes from the good, as good from ill.
Why, thou monkey, we’ve been cruising now hard upon three years and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth when thou art up there.
Whatever the validity of that claim, there is no doubt that it is among the greatest American novels, rich in allegory and symbolism, capable of being appreciated on many different levels; a book of profound depths and sonorities that continue to resonate in the mind long after one has put it down.
For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object – that final and romantic object, too many would have turned from in disgust.
And in the whale he created the symbol par excellence of malevolent power at work in an indifferent universe.
But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand, dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of? – what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating?
Soon ranging up by his flask, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the whale’s horrible wallow, and then ranging up from another fling.
As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As.
Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it was. – Most miserable!
It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale. – It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. – It’s a blasted heath. – It’s a Hyperborean winter scene. – It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain.
Both jaws, like enormous shears, bit the craft completely in twain.
Ain’t one limb enough?