V2, Chap 15 (Sahha), I, p 464 - Flip and Flop

[alice wellintown]

Ecclesiastes is influenced by both Stoicism and Epicureanism.
This chapter is loaded up with clever ambiguities and ironic allusions
to church and church law. The Church Key or Bottle Opener is one such.
So Ecc fits, and it is fitting that we should look back to Ch. 10,
where the famous “Keep Cool but Care” serves as a Maxim or Aphorism
and we note that Ecc too is a book full of these:
“Ecc features aphorisms and maxims illuminated in terse paragraphs
with reflections on the meaning of life and the best way of life.”
The best way of life may be an acknowledgement that life under the Sun
is meaningless or vain. Moreover, the pursuit of knowledge through (or
in) a glass darkly may be futile as Narcissism plunges one into
reflection and drowns even a transparent eyeball Pantheist/Platonist
in masthead reveries, though a Catskill Eagle still soars with
Solomon, first in the gorges of a wisdom that is woe, then into the
invisible spaces of the Sun.
Here, while Henry Adams and Stencil may point to the futility of
Education Solomon’s wisdom that is madness and woe, crossing over
Jordan suggests the Ohio. Such a crossing belies the “eat, drink, and
be merry” manacles forged in the minds of enslaved persons by holiday
celebrations and other mental slaveries the ignorant must emancipate
themselves from.
 Ecc emphatically proclaims all the actions of man to be   inherently
"vain", "futile", "empty", "meaningless", "temporary", "transitory",
"fleeting, or "mere breath", depending on translation, as the lives of
both wise and foolish men end in death. While Qohelet clearly endorses
wisdom as a means for a well-lived earthly life, he is unable to
ascribe eternal meaning to it. In light of this perceived
senselessness, he suggests that one should enjoy the simple pleasures
of daily life, such as eating, drinking, and taking enjoyment in one's
work, which are gifts from the hand of God (Wiki).

 What Melville did through Ishmael, then, was to put man's distinctly
modern feeling of 'exile', of abandonment, directly at the centre of
his stage. For Ishmael there are no satisfactory conclusions to
anything; no final philosophy is ever possible. All that man owns in
this world, Ishmael would say, is his insatiable mind. This is why the
book opens on a picture of the dreaming contemplativeness of mind
itself: men tearing themselves loose from their jobs to stand 'like
silent sentinels all around the town . . . thousands of mortal men
fixed in ocean reveries'. Narcissus was bemused by that image which
'we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans', and this, says Ishmael
when he is most desperate, is all that man ever finds when he searches
the waters—a reflection of himself. All is inconclusive, restless, an
endless flow. And Melville's own style rises to its highest level not
in the neo-Shakespearean speeches of Ahab, which are sometimes
bombastic, but in those amazing prose flights on the whiteness of the
whale and on the Pacific where Ishmael reproduces, in the rhythms of
the prose itself, man's brooding interrogation of nature.

ISHMAEL AND AHAB: An Introduction to Moby-Dick

by Alfred Kazin
(Introduction to Houghton Mifflin 'Riverside' edition of Moby-Dick)

But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of
understanding shall remain" (i.e. even while living) "in the
congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it
invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom
that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a
Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the
blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in
the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that
gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the
mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even
though they soar (M-D, CH. 96).