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EmmyOk
Aug 11, 2013

Read this for the first time last month and am relistening now on audiobook as I’m back in the countryside over Christmas and it’s lovely on long walks.


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EmmyOk
Aug 11, 2013

Lmfao

EmmyOk
Aug 11, 2013

His prose is great and he’s pretty explicit about whatever comparison he’s drawing to human experience. Maybe 10% is a textbook and the rest is the best book written

EmmyOk
Aug 11, 2013

IMO it's fine to want to understand the references and a nice copy like the penguin classics one has annotations for the big ones which are good and unobtrusive. It's just bizarre to think of it as 30% story and 70% encyclopedia. A lot of people read Moby Dick thinking it'll just be a rip roaring tale when it's a rumination on everything in life. There's definitely some small parts where he does seem to be just talking about whaling but that adds to the grand sum, most of hich is wonderful prose about human life. That's what's most baffling about op's take not the references or whatever. How you can think the majority of the book is just an encyclopedia is impossible for me to understand.

EmmyOk
Aug 11, 2013

let's all post some of our favourite passages

Big Man Herm posted:

[...] but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Wickliff's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. 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. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

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