{"id":1188,"date":"2006-09-28T13:24:00","date_gmt":"2006-09-28T18:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1188"},"modified":"2006-09-28T13:24:00","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T18:24:00","slug":"ishmael","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1188","title":{"rendered":"ishmael"},"content":{"rendered":"

He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.<\/p>\n

From Moby-Dick<\/i>, by Herman Melville<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I came across this while checking my e-mail. Gmail has a constantly-updating strip for links above the mail listing, and one of today’s links was a Melville quote. I clicked on it, and found, among others, the passage above. We studied American Romanticism in high school English, but we never read the book quoted from, instead focusing on more easily digestible oeuvres like Bartleby<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I kind of wish we had read it, in spite of its length and difficulty. There are universal themes running throughout it, which would of course have been lost on those of us with more ephemeral fixations (which describes most of us as teenagers), but they would have remained and brought themselves to bear later in life. That’s how a lot of early reading is, I think. Much like the music we listen to, we don’t always realize the songs and works of poetry and prose we experience are having the effect they are until circumstances converge to expose their influence.<\/p>\n

Today I find the quote and themes expressed in the book, specifically ones about purpose and meaning, to be very much in line with recent thinking. Ahab’s purpose, the meaning of his life, was exaggerated, but on a smaller scale the kinship of our spirit understands his obsession, being made of the same stuff, as it were. We have the same capacity to ignore the only Source of transcendent, true meaning and to give place to the pursuits which are all too eager to rush in and fill the void left behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it. From Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville I came across this while checking my e-mail. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}