And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
The use of the English language at its maximum power. My favorite chapter: The Try Works.
"All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit."
Nothing like a couple hundred gallons of boiling oil over a roiling fire on a bouncy small wooden ship, to give you nightmares. These people were crazy. Melville was correct, they were a death cult.
My dad had his copy from his boyhood, the edition with the color plates and the line drawings. I had read it twice before I started first grade. I was too young to grasp the allegory but it was an amazing read.
Call me Ishmael. My favorite opening line in a book.
ReplyDeleteMoby's Dick appears to have risen.
ReplyDeleteTried to read that book. Needed a thesaurus in the other hand!
ReplyDeleteit's an instruction book, among other things.
DeleteMelville did indeed know what he wrote.
DeleteThe use of the English language at its maximum power. My favorite chapter: The Try Works.
Delete"All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit."
Big effin' balls to spear a sperm whale in a wood dingy.
ReplyDeleteNothing like a couple hundred gallons of boiling oil over a roiling fire on a bouncy small wooden ship, to give you nightmares. These people were crazy. Melville was correct, they were a death cult.
ReplyDeleteMy dad had his copy from his boyhood, the edition with the color plates and the line drawings. I had read it twice before I started first grade. I was too young to grasp the allegory but it was an amazing read.