Albert Pinkham Ryder, Moonlight, 1917; oil on mahogany panel, 15 7/8 x 17 3/4 in.
I have been reading that monumental work of American literature, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. It is remarkable, full of humor and pathos, information and elegiac prose. Melville can wax eloquent on the mundane aspects of whaling such as the rope used with the harpoon––"All men live enveloped in whale-lines." He brings a deep yearning to unimaginable sights, such a vast herd of Sperm whales, whose calm center brings forth this beautiful language and mood:
....amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still forever 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.In writing of entering the Pacific ocean, Melville's prose rises and falls, swells and rolls in rhythms of ocean waves:
And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures,wide-rolling watery prairies and Potter's Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.Yet amid all this glorious writing, there is one sentence that I keep going back to, that encapsulates for me the condition of our human species:
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe.
Always, even since I was twelve or so, have had a special place in my feelings for Ryder.
ReplyDeleteRyder is a remarkable painter; I thought his work was perfect to illustrate these thoughts.
DeleteWonderful post, Altoon.
ReplyDeleteThank you for words from that great book.
ReplyDeleteSultanically done.
ReplyDeletethanks so much, donna and Susan and Anon., for your kind comments.
ReplyDeleteTook a hike up Monument Mountain a few weeks ago to mark Melville's hike up there with Nathaniel Hawthorne....what a duo!
ReplyDeleteJan, my volume of Moby Dick has the Melville letters to Hawthorne. I haven't read them carefully yet, but Hawthorne was certainly very important to him. What a great idea to do that hike.
DeleteMelville wrote Moby Dick at Arrowhead, the 18th-century house near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he lived in for 13 years beginning in 1850.
ReplyDeleteOn a visit there in 1980, looking at his view of the distant Mount Greylock from the 2nd-floor room in which he wrote, I was reminded of the book. The view appeared like a seascape of water and swells, but of trees and hills. Much later, I found this, written by him shortly after moving to Arrowhead: "I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney."
Thanks for that Melville quote, Richard; I guess he never left the feeling of the sea.
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