Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquerable whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. — Captain Ahab
Thanks to long stretches spent once again on New York’s subways, I’m able to take on projects like Melville’s 1851 masterpiece, which I’d never read before. One thing that stands out for me — aside from the dated concept that whales are dangerous to humans — is the fact that Melville, for all his awed and lengthy tributes to the grandeur of “Leviathan,” for all his copious and dry research into the classification and behavior of whales, lived at a time when nothing was known about whale songs. I can’t help but imagine what he’d say about them.
Of the countless extraordinary passages in the book, one of them — an instance of the “high and extravagant rhetoric” of the American sublime, according to the Introduction by literary scholar Carl F. Hovde — will always stay with me. In the chapter called “The Gilder,” Melville writes of the “land-like feeling” one develops toward the ocean after sailing its surface for long periods, when the ship moves “not through high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie….”
Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeing moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence, doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them; the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
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