American's transcend decline

[Terrance]

Nature undefiled--this is the inevitable setting for the Sacred Marriage
of males . . . 
it is the motion of water which completes the syndrome, the American
dream of 
isolation afloat. [. . .] The immensity of water defines a loneliness
that demands 
love; its strangeness symbolizes the disavowal of the conventional that
makes 
possible all versions of love. 

	--Fiedler on Melville's Ishmael and Queequeg and Twain's Huck and Jim

America! Oh Immesnity! 

Come, Boyz, each alone, solitary men, let us play. 

In the name of our destiny, the manifest, the sould in every stone....

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy
  to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage
  ashore.  But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The
  intense concentration of self in the middle of such a
  heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when
  sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea- mark how
  closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.



	--Melville, M-D

Oh Immensity! God in his Glory!