After a weekend spent feeling like I was getting sick on Saturday and worse on Sunday, I'm finally coming back to life. This Treegap Governess is not good at ailing, especially when the weekend promised sun and beautiful fall days. But when I couldn’t even finish reading the Sunday paper because my head throbbed and chest started burning when I coughed, well that was a bad sign. Let’s just say a creative mind has not been on the agenda for a few days.
Today’s post will not be a poem, instead a great passage from Moby Dick. Why this seemingly strange passage from a classic novel that wasn’t even one of my favorites? Well, the struggle over a fever from the weekend perhaps, but at the same time, I shared a laugh with a lifelong friend recently about our old college admissions letters. It cheered my spirit to be able to look back and completely realize how cheesy and terrible one of my essays truly was, the one that borrowed the first line from Melville's classic. Instead of “Call me Ishmael…” Yeah, need I say more. “Call me stupid” is what it should have read, rather than the call me by my moniker. (Thankfully college admissions officers ignored this bit of AP English schmaltz!)
Needless to say this exchange had me laughing and before long coughing as if my very own chest had been a mortar, just like the last line of this passage. This is from Chapter 41.
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field....
Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;
-- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, where visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
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