phantom

 

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Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? 
 

Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? 
 

Surely all this is not without meaning. 
 

And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, 
who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. 
 

But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans.
 

It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; 
and this is the key to it all.

—Herman Melville
Moby-Dick, 1851

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sweet mystery

 

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There is, one knows not what sweet mystery 
about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seems to speak 
of some hidden soul beneath; 

like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod 
over the buried Evangelist St. John. 

And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, 
wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ 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.

—Herman Melville 
Moby-Dick, 1851

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magic

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Take almost any path you please, and ten to one 
it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there 
by a pool in the stream. 

There is magic in it.  

Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged 
in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, 
set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you 
to water, if water there be in all that region.  

Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert,
try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied 
with a metaphysical professor.  

Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water
are wedded forever.


—Herman Melville 
Moby Dick, 1851 

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