- Jun 2024
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gutenberg.org gutenberg.org
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yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.
Recalls "Young Goodman-Brown." Does it put a question to Hawthorne in some sense--have you, lubber, any notion of the true terrors of the world?
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The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers’ hearts.
A line which recalls the unabating liminality of this tale, a within-and-without quality which lends to it the overawing character of the sublime.
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And now, as we eighteen men with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals
The analysis of the men into their constituent parts magnifies the kind of horror of the scene, the many-armed hauling of a corpse across the dark water.
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The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons.
Likewise Melville's story, which is composed of so many yarns spun together. Can they bear the monstrous weight he puts on them? Can they bear us, who are likewise fast and loose fish?
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magical, sometimes horrible
The combination of magic and terror hints at that characteristic of the sublime already alluded to by several others here--that experience of being brought before the aesthetically terrible object which keeps the soul in tension between the sense of being overwhelmed and the sense of the self expanding to the bounds of that overwhelming thing.
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