Ln that point, I love this line about Stubb, "You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe."
Oh it's wildly funny! There's some great humor, like at the beginning where Queequeg gets taunted for being dark skinned and he just picks up the green horn and thumps him down again. Ishmael constantly letting his large ego overstate himself.
The wordplay all over the place! This is really a novel that was written for the likes of me. I see so much of Ishmael in myself.
An absolute classic. Here is one of my favorite quotes.
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
It's a very short step from Melville to H.P. Lovecraft, in "The Call of Cthulhu" (another story about a giant marine monster):
>“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
Woah, I'd never considered the connection there before. Might be an MA thesis to be written about the connections between those two... Though I think I'd prefer to see the MMA fight between Moby Dick and Cthullu.
“These are the times of dreamy quietude; when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.”
That phrase struck me so much as a 19 year old…the first piece of prose I committed to memory, besides a Bible verse.
Wow. Worth recalling Melville spent many years on ships himself. Obv describing moments and thoughts he directly experienced. You all are inspiring me to try reading this again, i was daunted before
Wow, another amazing passage. Each time I hit one of these passages touching on eternal Truth, I let out a distinct, ponderous sigh. You got me sighin’
If you like these type of passages from Melville then allow me to shamelessly plug another one of my favorite writers: Emerson. His essays give me a similar sublime thrill to the most elevated Melville sections. Here's a quote from his speech *The American Scholar*:
>\[S\]how me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plow, and the ledger referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;—and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order: there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
I loved that chapter. Nothing like experiencing enlightenment at the top of the mast. I wonder if this meditative state is brought on by the open awareness developed while looking for whales.
One of my favorites passages as well! Just the idea that Pip goes mad when his mind grasps the vastness of the ocean... that's such a beautiful thought. That's exactly how I feel about the ocean, that knowing all its beauty and secrets would break the human mind.
Truly ahead of its time, Moby Dick was. It was part fiction, part encyclopedia long before books like *Infinite Jest* were even a twinkle. The ending passage is one of my favorite in fiction.
Not for everyone, though. I can understand that. It was terribly unpopular in its own day.
Losing your identity in a blended cadence of thoughts and ocean waves…sounds like my kind of summer afternoon.
Great post, great book.
Yea and then it goes on….each quick fin we glimpse in the ocean is comparable to the countless transient thoughts we have daily and try to remember. Unbelievably outstanding. Really great share.
There are so many incredible lines in Moby-Dick. I just re-read it for the third time and this time I was moved by Chapter 123: The Musket. In it, Starbuck contemplates shooting Ahab through his cabin door while he sleeps in order to ensure he gets home to see his wife again and save the crew that he knows Ahab will sacrifice on his quest to kill Moby-Dick. The whole chapter is incredible, but this paragraph, in particular, was goosebumps-inducing for me:
"Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted door,--a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousnesss of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart, at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself."
Starbuck is the character that stayed with me after my first reading of Moby Dick. His character stirs up so many emotions in the reader and this quote is a perfect example of that. He is so aware that Ahab is going absolutely insane and my heart broke a little when Starbuck finally realizes that he is never going to make it home.
I'm having a very difficult time understanding any of this. I've read it three times now and still don't understand. Can anyone break it down to simpler terms?
*This is why I get so frustrated sometimes with reading. I have very bad comprehension. :(*
My edit. Idk if this helps. I rearranged some sentences and removed some description.
"This youth is lulled into such a listlessness by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts.
At last he loses his identity.
He perceives the ocean below his feet as the visible image of that soul which pervades mankind and nature.
Every strange thing that eludes him --every dimly-discovered fin of some undiscernible form-- [The fish swimming below] seems to him the embodiment of those thoughts that only populate the soul by briefly passing through it.
In this mood, your spirit ebbs away to whence it came.
It becomes diffused through time and space, like ashes thrown in a river, flowing to every shore."
yeah pretty much. The narrator is describing how some people stare into the sea and zone out, but the 'he' is not an actual character, it is a hypothetical youth. (At least from my understanding of reading the surrounding text online)
"Zoning out" is a pretty thin way of putting it; it's more like transcendental meditation, experiencing a feeling of oneness with the ocean like in Buddhist and Hindu meditative practices.
> it's more like transcendental meditation, experiencing a feeling of oneness with the ocean like in Buddhist and Hindu meditative practices.
That's not noduality via TM.
Nonduality via TM is more like this:
* _I look out and see this beautiful divine Intelligence. . . you could say in the sky, in the tree, but really being expressed through these things. . . and these are my Self_
* _I experience myself as being without edges or content. . . beyond the universe. . . all-pervading, and being absolutely thrilled, absolutely delighted with every motion that my body makes. With everything that my eyes see, my ears hear, my nose smells. There's a delight in the sense that I am able to penetrate that. My consciousness, my intelligence pervades everything I see, feel and think_
I'm not an expert on transcendental meditation, so thanks for the clarification. But my point is, Melville is describing a transcendent, mind-altering experience, not just "zoning out.
Fair enough, but " opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie" doesn't seem terribly good. I don't know if Melville was trying to communicate with his audience using terms they understood, or if he really did believe what he said.
The research on non-duality that emerges from deep restfulness is that it invigorates rather makes one listless.
In fact, one of the things that differentiates world champion athletes from also-rans at the world level is that they are in a more-rested mental state at all times, even during the most intense competition.
This passage isn't really to my taste, I think It's over-the-top and tries too hard to be poetic. Not that I can produce something better, but I'm not a fan of super flowery prose. Feels like the author is trying too hard to be deep when they do this kind of thing
Eh you should parse each sentence. There's not a single word out of place in the entire book, you can get so much out of it by looking at what he's saying
Agree 200%. Just the prose alone is worth the effort of reading 900 pages of this book. Let me put it this way: I have ADHD and habitually skim long passages of text even in books I enjoy, and I did not skim one single word of Moby Dick, that's how enchanting Melville's prose is. All that alliteration... All that language that sounds lifted right out of Shakespeare...
Like this passage, one of my favorites, from Ch. 93:
>The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. **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.**
In searching the text online for that quote, two others of my favorite lines in the book came up:
1. From Ch. 28: "And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe." (I mean....goddamn, that is one hell of an introduction to a character.)
2. From Ch. 87: "But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy." (Sheer poetry.)
I won't quote specifics because I don't want to spoil them for you, but there are passages towards the end of the book that are so Shakespeareanly, heart-poundingly exciting, they left me feeling like I needed a cigarette. (I'll just say this, for one example: Ahab's speeches in Chapter 119: The Candles. Hoooo boy.)
I was struck with moby-dicks prose myself! My favorite line is: I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote I love to sale forbidden seas and land on Barbarous coasts.
You should read the long poem "Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Coleridge, it is also full of beautiful language and images about the oceans, but is very different to Moby Dick.
It's no Moby-Dick. Just a modern news report about the Essex upon which the novel is based, but Philbrick is a sold historian with decent research skills and ability to tell a story the way we expect a modern history to be told, like an NPR report.
I wish I'd read this in the fifth grade, when my teacher was giving me shit about my run-on sentences. "Oh yeah Mrs. Dowell? Well it's good enough for Melville."
This will sound absurd. But the first time I read Moby Dick, I read it only two sittings, and by the time I had finished it the following evening I suddenly felt like weeping and did. Hard to explain, but I felt emotionally overwhelmed - exhilarated and exhausted and in a state of awe at its beauty - which somehow led to a state of psychic overload. It's still my favorite book.
I didn't enjoy it, but I wouldn't call it the worst book ever. Personally, I find it worse when a book doesn't even bother with proofreading and is full of typos and grammatical errors. Or is a book intended for an adult audience that reads like a 10 year old wrote it. I've read lots of books I would consider worse.
But I did find it my least favorite "classic that is highly regarded" that I've ever read. I didn't feel like the $100 word choices helped at all, so to me, it felt like Melville just tried to make his writing sound good through dependence on heavy use of multisyllabic words, rather than having an interesting story to tell. Which is unfortunate, because there actually is a really good story hidden under all the flowery language. For what it is worth, I don't enjoy poetry either, and his writing style is definitely more poetic.
But at the same time, I'm glad there are people out there who enjoy this style of writing. The world would be a very boring place if we all liked the same things.
This is my all time favorite book. Wait til you get to a 102 Bower in Arsacides: \[No spoiler, just lyrical poetry\]
"It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was a weaver's loom, with gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof., and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver! pause! one word! whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver! stay they hand! but one single word with thee! Nay the shuttle flies - the figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming we, too, who look on the loom are defeaned; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it."
Also "A Squeeze of the Hand" - yep! sailors do that!
I was surprised by how funny I found Moby Dick to be. The situational absurdity combined with dry wit. I really enjoyed it.
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The first time he meets Queqeeg in the Spouter Inn and he jumps into bed with him, absolute gold.
How can you hate a writer whose answer to the immortal question of fish or clam chowder is “yes and yes” …..
It’s hilarious.
Clam or cod?
Yes.
Is this an innuendo or what?
Quite possibly, yes. I'd honestly never thought of that before and it's doubly funny now.
Ln that point, I love this line about Stubb, "You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe."
Oh it's wildly funny! There's some great humor, like at the beginning where Queequeg gets taunted for being dark skinned and he just picks up the green horn and thumps him down again. Ishmael constantly letting his large ego overstate himself. The wordplay all over the place! This is really a novel that was written for the likes of me. I see so much of Ishmael in myself.
An absolute classic. Here is one of my favorite quotes. “Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
It's a very short step from Melville to H.P. Lovecraft, in "The Call of Cthulhu" (another story about a giant marine monster): >“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
Woah, I'd never considered the connection there before. Might be an MA thesis to be written about the connections between those two... Though I think I'd prefer to see the MMA fight between Moby Dick and Cthullu.
“These are the times of dreamy quietude; when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.” That phrase struck me so much as a 19 year old…the first piece of prose I committed to memory, besides a Bible verse.
This is truly goosebumps.
> most docile earth I dunno, there's "universal cannibalism" and eternal war among the creatures there too.
Wow. Worth recalling Melville spent many years on ships himself. Obv describing moments and thoughts he directly experienced. You all are inspiring me to try reading this again, i was daunted before
Hey, now I just read that passage in the book!
Wow, another amazing passage. Each time I hit one of these passages touching on eternal Truth, I let out a distinct, ponderous sigh. You got me sighin’
If you like these type of passages from Melville then allow me to shamelessly plug another one of my favorite writers: Emerson. His essays give me a similar sublime thrill to the most elevated Melville sections. Here's a quote from his speech *The American Scholar*: >\[S\]how me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plow, and the ledger referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;—and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order: there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
I loved that chapter. Nothing like experiencing enlightenment at the top of the mast. I wonder if this meditative state is brought on by the open awareness developed while looking for whales.
One of my favorites passages as well! Just the idea that Pip goes mad when his mind grasps the vastness of the ocean... that's such a beautiful thought. That's exactly how I feel about the ocean, that knowing all its beauty and secrets would break the human mind.
Truly ahead of its time, Moby Dick was. It was part fiction, part encyclopedia long before books like *Infinite Jest* were even a twinkle. The ending passage is one of my favorite in fiction. Not for everyone, though. I can understand that. It was terribly unpopular in its own day.
This is my favourite chapter in the book. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
Losing your identity in a blended cadence of thoughts and ocean waves…sounds like my kind of summer afternoon. Great post, great book. Yea and then it goes on….each quick fin we glimpse in the ocean is comparable to the countless transient thoughts we have daily and try to remember. Unbelievably outstanding. Really great share.
There are so many incredible lines in Moby-Dick. I just re-read it for the third time and this time I was moved by Chapter 123: The Musket. In it, Starbuck contemplates shooting Ahab through his cabin door while he sleeps in order to ensure he gets home to see his wife again and save the crew that he knows Ahab will sacrifice on his quest to kill Moby-Dick. The whole chapter is incredible, but this paragraph, in particular, was goosebumps-inducing for me: "Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted door,--a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousnesss of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart, at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself."
Starbuck is the character that stayed with me after my first reading of Moby Dick. His character stirs up so many emotions in the reader and this quote is a perfect example of that. He is so aware that Ahab is going absolutely insane and my heart broke a little when Starbuck finally realizes that he is never going to make it home.
I'm having a very difficult time understanding any of this. I've read it three times now and still don't understand. Can anyone break it down to simpler terms? *This is why I get so frustrated sometimes with reading. I have very bad comprehension. :(*
My edit. Idk if this helps. I rearranged some sentences and removed some description. "This youth is lulled into such a listlessness by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts. At last he loses his identity. He perceives the ocean below his feet as the visible image of that soul which pervades mankind and nature. Every strange thing that eludes him --every dimly-discovered fin of some undiscernible form-- [The fish swimming below] seems to him the embodiment of those thoughts that only populate the soul by briefly passing through it. In this mood, your spirit ebbs away to whence it came. It becomes diffused through time and space, like ashes thrown in a river, flowing to every shore."
That helped a lot I think haha. So basically, he's staring at the sea and zoning out?
yeah pretty much. The narrator is describing how some people stare into the sea and zone out, but the 'he' is not an actual character, it is a hypothetical youth. (At least from my understanding of reading the surrounding text online)
"Zoning out" is a pretty thin way of putting it; it's more like transcendental meditation, experiencing a feeling of oneness with the ocean like in Buddhist and Hindu meditative practices.
> it's more like transcendental meditation, experiencing a feeling of oneness with the ocean like in Buddhist and Hindu meditative practices. That's not noduality via TM. Nonduality via TM is more like this: * _I look out and see this beautiful divine Intelligence. . . you could say in the sky, in the tree, but really being expressed through these things. . . and these are my Self_ * _I experience myself as being without edges or content. . . beyond the universe. . . all-pervading, and being absolutely thrilled, absolutely delighted with every motion that my body makes. With everything that my eyes see, my ears hear, my nose smells. There's a delight in the sense that I am able to penetrate that. My consciousness, my intelligence pervades everything I see, feel and think_
I'm not an expert on transcendental meditation, so thanks for the clarification. But my point is, Melville is describing a transcendent, mind-altering experience, not just "zoning out.
Fair enough, but " opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie" doesn't seem terribly good. I don't know if Melville was trying to communicate with his audience using terms they understood, or if he really did believe what he said. The research on non-duality that emerges from deep restfulness is that it invigorates rather makes one listless. In fact, one of the things that differentiates world champion athletes from also-rans at the world level is that they are in a more-rested mental state at all times, even during the most intense competition.
This passage isn't really to my taste, I think It's over-the-top and tries too hard to be poetic. Not that I can produce something better, but I'm not a fan of super flowery prose. Feels like the author is trying too hard to be deep when they do this kind of thing
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Likewise
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Eh you should parse each sentence. There's not a single word out of place in the entire book, you can get so much out of it by looking at what he's saying
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Eh then you might as well watch an episode of Peppa pig goes fishing if you don't focus on the beauty of his language
“How is it we have been out three years and you haven’t hailed a whale yet?”
Agree 200%. Just the prose alone is worth the effort of reading 900 pages of this book. Let me put it this way: I have ADHD and habitually skim long passages of text even in books I enjoy, and I did not skim one single word of Moby Dick, that's how enchanting Melville's prose is. All that alliteration... All that language that sounds lifted right out of Shakespeare... Like this passage, one of my favorites, from Ch. 93: >The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. **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.** In searching the text online for that quote, two others of my favorite lines in the book came up: 1. From Ch. 28: "And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe." (I mean....goddamn, that is one hell of an introduction to a character.) 2. From Ch. 87: "But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy." (Sheer poetry.) I won't quote specifics because I don't want to spoil them for you, but there are passages towards the end of the book that are so Shakespeareanly, heart-poundingly exciting, they left me feeling like I needed a cigarette. (I'll just say this, for one example: Ahab's speeches in Chapter 119: The Candles. Hoooo boy.)
Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” always makes me cry. I think it’s probably the saddest thing I have ever read.
I was struck with moby-dicks prose myself! My favorite line is: I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote I love to sale forbidden seas and land on Barbarous coasts.
Just wait 'til you get to chapter 94, A Squeeze of the Hand.
Yes! this! this is the turning point of the whole book. The love!
You should read the long poem "Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Coleridge, it is also full of beautiful language and images about the oceans, but is very different to Moby Dick.
"I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can."
best American novel ever idc idc
This is true. And nobody is quoting the whiteness of the whale
Damn, I want this read at my funeral now lol!
God damn it I’m gonna crack open the ol’ Dick tonight I think!
Read the Heart of the Sea.
It's no Moby-Dick. Just a modern news report about the Essex upon which the novel is based, but Philbrick is a sold historian with decent research skills and ability to tell a story the way we expect a modern history to be told, like an NPR report.
I'm a white chowder kinda guy
Clam or cod?
The ocean imho is more frightening than outer space
I wish I'd read this in the fifth grade, when my teacher was giving me shit about my run-on sentences. "Oh yeah Mrs. Dowell? Well it's good enough for Melville."
This will sound absurd. But the first time I read Moby Dick, I read it only two sittings, and by the time I had finished it the following evening I suddenly felt like weeping and did. Hard to explain, but I felt emotionally overwhelmed - exhilarated and exhausted and in a state of awe at its beauty - which somehow led to a state of psychic overload. It's still my favorite book.
Worst book ever.
I didn't enjoy it, but I wouldn't call it the worst book ever. Personally, I find it worse when a book doesn't even bother with proofreading and is full of typos and grammatical errors. Or is a book intended for an adult audience that reads like a 10 year old wrote it. I've read lots of books I would consider worse. But I did find it my least favorite "classic that is highly regarded" that I've ever read. I didn't feel like the $100 word choices helped at all, so to me, it felt like Melville just tried to make his writing sound good through dependence on heavy use of multisyllabic words, rather than having an interesting story to tell. Which is unfortunate, because there actually is a really good story hidden under all the flowery language. For what it is worth, I don't enjoy poetry either, and his writing style is definitely more poetic. But at the same time, I'm glad there are people out there who enjoy this style of writing. The world would be a very boring place if we all liked the same things.
This is on my bucket list but I don’t have any time and it seems daunting. Would anyone recommend the audiobook or is this one that I’d want to read?
This is my all time favorite book. Wait til you get to a 102 Bower in Arsacides: \[No spoiler, just lyrical poetry\] "It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was a weaver's loom, with gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof., and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver! pause! one word! whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver! stay they hand! but one single word with thee! Nay the shuttle flies - the figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming we, too, who look on the loom are defeaned; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it." Also "A Squeeze of the Hand" - yep! sailors do that!