Fwd: whale-mail

[David Casseres]

Subject:     whale-mail
Sent:        3/20/97 19:56
Received:    3/20/97 21:05
From:        Jim Propp, propp at math.mit.edu
To:          silent-tristero at world.std.com


 "Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago ---  never mind how long precisely ---
 having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest
 me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery
 part of the world.  It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and
 regulating the circulation.  Whenever I find myself growing grim about
 the mouth; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin
 warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and
 especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it 
 requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately
 stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off 
 --- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.  This 
 is my substitute for pistol and ball.  With a philosophical flourish 
 Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.  There 
 is nothing surprising in this.  If they but knew it, almost all men in
 their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings
 towards the ocean with me."

How many times have you meant to sit down and actually read these words,
and the many thousands that follow?  And how many times have you nodded
knowingly when people discuss "Moby Dick", hoping no one will catch on
to the fact that you haven't actually read it?  Because (let's face it):
you don't have time to read books.  Time for email, sure; two or three 
hours a day of it.  But literature?  "Gimme a break," you say.

 "There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes belted round by
 wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs --- commerce surrounds it with
 her surf.  Right and left, the streets take you waterward.  Its extreme
 downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and 
 cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.
 Look at the crowds of water-gazers there."

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 "Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbatch afternoon.  Go from 
Corlears
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 you see? --- Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand 
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 over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, 
as 
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...

 "But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the
 sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of
 the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of
 the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over
 the destroying billows they almost touched; --- at that instant,
 a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air,
 in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding
 spar.  A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck 
 downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the 
 flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to
 intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the
 wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the
 submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen
 there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and
 his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form
 folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like
 Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part
 of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it."

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 "Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen
 white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the
 great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years
 ago."

--- Jim Propp (who still hasn't read Moby Dick;
    based on a concept by David Feldman)



Cheers,
David