Joshua West’s Reviews > Moby Dick > Status Update

from The Gilder: '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.'

from The Castaway: He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

from Of Whales; in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet Iron; in Mountains; in Stars: ‘With a frigate’s anchors for my bridal-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!’

from my favorite chapter, The Whiteness of the Whale: 'yet for all these accumulated sensations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks and elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.'

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.

From the Cetology chapter: ‘Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this [the killer]whale on the ground of its indistinctiveness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and sharks included.’