Moby Dick: Loomings

Call me Ishmael — some years ago, with little money in my purse and nothing to interest me on shore, I decided to sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.Whenever I grow grim about the mouth, and whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, I decide that it is high time to get to sea as soon as I can.The sea is my cure for gloom, and I am sure that almost every man, sooner or later, feels much the same about the ocean as I do.

Just look at the city of Manhattan, ringed with wharves like an island ringed with coral reefs, where every street to the left and right leads you down to the water.On a dreamy Sunday afternoon, thousands upon thousands of men stand like silent guards along the piers, lost in ocean reveries.These are the same men who spend their weekdays shut up in offices, tied to counters and nailed to benches, so what are they doing here?

Nothing will satisfy them except the very edge of the land, and they stand as near the water as they can without falling in.Even in the quiet countryside, almost any path you take will lead you down to a pool in a stream, and even the most absent-minded dreamer will find his way to water.Even a painter’s most peaceful landscape would feel empty without water, so I ask you: why is almost every healthy boy, at some time or other, crazy to go to sea?I think the answer lies in Narcissus, who plunged into the water to grasp a lovely image and drowned; in every ocean we see that same image, the ungraspable phantom of life.

When I go to sea, I never go as a passenger, because passengers need a full purse and get seasick and grow quarrelsome, and I never go as a captain or a cook either.I go as a simple sailor, right up into the rigging, where the old captains order me about and make me jump from spar to spar like a grasshopper in a May meadow.At first this stings your pride, especially if you were lately a country schoolmaster with the tallest boys standing in awe of you, but even that wears off in time.

Besides, a sailor is paid for his trouble while a passenger must pay, and there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid.Best of all, a sailor enjoys the healthy exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck, while the captain on the quarter-deck breathes his air second-hand from the crew.

Why I chose a whaling voyage this time, I cannot say, but I imagine that Fate’s playbill read: Grand Election for the Presidency, Whaling Voyage by One Ishmael, Bloody Battle in Afghanistan.Above all, it was the great whale himself, that mysterious monster of distant seas, who drew me on, and in my imagination one grand, hooded phantom rose among the whales like a snow hill in the air.