wychelm reblogged
totally crazy example to use to demonstrate The Comparative Loneliness Epidemic Of The Twenty-First Century. melville was lonely as hell just jerking it unreciprocated to nathaniel hawthorne every night. that's a different thing
wychelm reblogged
hiiii mdms (moby dick mutuals) do you guys know about power moby dick (funny name). it’s an online annotation of moby dick that provides explanations for allusions and definitions for outdated terms/whaling jargon. it is so fun i am clicking around and exploring and learning a lot of new old-timey maritime words <3
wychelm reblogged
“I have no doubt he will be repaid by finding Mr Melville a very different man from what he imagines - & very agreeable and entertaining - We find him so - a man with a true warm heart & a soul & an intellect - with life to his finger-tips - earnest, sincere & reverent, very tender & modest - And I am not sure that he is not a very great man - but I have not quite decided upon my own opinion - I should say, I am not quite sure that I do not think him a very great man - for my opinion is of course as far as possible from settling the matter. He has very keen perceptive power, but what astonishes me is that his eyes are not large & deep. He seems to see every thing very accurately & how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight & rather handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility & emotion. He is tall & erect with an air free, brave & manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture & force, & loses himself in his subject. There is no grace nor polish. Once in a while his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression out of those eyes, to which I have objected - an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel - that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into himself. I saw him look at Una so yesterday several times.”
— Sophia Hawthorne, writing to her sister Elizabeth, 4 September 1850
wychelm reblogged
The White Whale, 2021
[...] why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
wychelm reblogged
folks with special interests/hyperfixations NOT related to media (book series, tv shows, movies, etc), what are they and what do you like about it?
wychelm reblogged
“A man of a deep and noble nature had seized me in this seclusion… . The soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams… . But already I feel that Hawthorne had dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil in my Southern soul.”
— Herman Melville on Nathaniel Hawthorne
from Pierre by Herman Melville
wychelm reblogged
after j.g. ballard’s the drowned giant (and watching the love death + robots ep): i’m reminded of the industrial-scale slaughter in dishonored and in moby dick in the sense that those inhabiting these stories are mutilating larger-than-life creatures that you’re positioned to feel reverent towards. there’s an ineffable gloom and also a grotesque beauty to these narratives, and in these dead and divine beings.
moby dick is a colossal sperm whale; in dishonored the whales more closely resemble that same prehistoric livyatan melvillei than our modern whales; and then, in ballard’s story—“although his heels were partly submerged in the sand, the feet rose to at least twice the fishermen’s height, and we immediately realised that this drowned leviathan had the mass and dimensions of the largest sperm whale”
an excerpt from philip hoare’s leviathan:
#herman melville#dishonored#literature#I find it fascinating when people make sweeping statements like you picture a sperm whale when you think of whales a child will draw one#when you ask them to draw a whale#I mean it's just not true#I understand poetic license but I genuinely find it aggravating#I'm curious to read it but I think I would hate it as much as I hated down to the sea in ships#anyway I do very much want to read the ballard#sorry op if you see these tags and think I'm being overly critical I just like to write a stream of consciousness when it comes to me
“The Anti-Transcendentalism of Moby-Dick” by Michael J Hoffman [x]
“Moby-Dick is a paradigm of the above point of view. While it is certainly about the search for an albino whale, it is more certainly about the incredible dangers of mythmaking. The whale symbolizes nothing. He is there, and occasion for others to create myths. Melville tells us as much in the chapter entitled “Moby Dick.” Two generations of critics have busied themselves with worrying about what the whale symbolizes. They should have been concerned with the creator of meanings, Captain Ahab, for it is he (not Melville) who has created the ‘meaning’ of the white whale. He fashions the myth of Moby Dick to give substance, form, and value to his own unhappy life, and he is aided in his efforts by other mariners who in turn project their own meanings on to the animal. His entire crew begins to share his vision, until they are nothing more than instruments of their captain. When they agree to impose Ahab’s arbitrary categories on the world, they give up their own free will—whatever that may be— and join him in a massive suicide. Narcissus sees his reflection in the pool and drowns, trying to merge with it. In the first chapter Ishmael tells us that the meaning of Narcissus is “the key to it all.” And he further admits that going out to sea and committing himself to the watery world is his “substitute for pistol and ball.”
That a nothing should torment a nothing; for I am a nothing. It is all a dream—we dream that we dreamed we dream.
Herman Melville, Pierre; or The Ambiguities
havingrevelations-deactivated20
Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do (a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder), in a rough outside coat, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner.... [W]e soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; ... and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind.... Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists -- and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before -- in wondering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's journal
wychelm reblogged
Whale tooth Scrimshaw, after 1851
An interesting piece, especially when you look at the details. The name Pequod could suggest that a member of the Native American Pequod tribe made it. But the whaling scenes speak against it. On the left, a whale hunt for a white whale, well, that could be aimed at a normal whale hunt, but on the right, next to the white whale, we also have a sinking ship, and with the name Pequod, we are in the naval fiction area, namely with Moby Dick. Apparently the scrimshander liked the book and made this piece, cearly after 1851 when the book was first published. Does this already fall under fanart?
wychelm reblogged
Moby Dick (1956), dir. John Huston