Hughlings Himwich

Googledoodle: Moby Dick

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Speak, thou vast and venerable head!

The Sphynx

“Speak, thou vast and venerable head,

which, though ungarnished with a beard,

yet here and there looking hoary

with mosses; speak, mighty head,

and tell us the secret thing that is in thee.

Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest.

That head upon which the upper sun now gleams,

has moved amid this world’s foundations.

Where unrecorded names and navies rust,

and untold hopes and anchors rot;

where in her murderous hold this frigate

earth is ballasted with bones of millions

drowned; there, in that awful water-

land, there was thy most familiar home.

Thou has been where bell or diver never went;

hast slept by many a sailor’s side,

where sleepless mothers would give

their lives to lay them down.

Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping

from their flaming ship; heart to heart

they sank beneath the exulting wave;

true to each other, when heaven seemed false

to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate

when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck;

for hours he fell into deeper midnight

of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still

sailed on unharmed – while swift lightning

shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne

a righteous husband to outstretched arms. 

O head! Thou has seen enough to split

the planets and make an infidel of Abraham,

and not one syllable is thine.”

                        Herman Melville, “The Sphynx,” Chapter 70, Moby Dick

Take Heart, Take Heart

   

   Glimpses do ye seem to see
   of that mortally intolerable truth;
   that all deep, earnest thinking
   is but the intrepid effort of the soul
   to keep the open independence of her sea;
   while the wildest winds of heaven and earth 
   conspire to cast her on the treacherous,
        slavish shore?

   But as in landlessness alone
   resides the highest truth, shoreless,
   indefinite as God – so  is it better
   to perish in that howling infinite,
   than to be ingloriously dashed upon the lee,
        even if that were safety! . . .

“The Lee Shore,” Moby Dick, Chapter 23

The Weaver-God, He Weaves

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 deafened;
and only when we escape it
shall we hear the thousand voices
that speak through it.

(Herman Melville, Moby Dick, "A Bower in the Arsacides")