Not P but Moby-Dick (75)

[Mike Jing]

It seems I'm not the only one who thinks so. I found this as the first hit
in google books search for "green damp mould":

https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Pen_of_Iron/kDKrkyn-1DkC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22green+damp+mould%22&pg=PA61

The peculiar final gesture of this paragraph is another instance of
Melville’s propensity to introduce jocular half-notes into dark
meditations. The person who skirts around the ineluctable reality of death
and despair is unsuited “to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green
damp mould with unfathomable wondrous Solomon.” This is, I think, a kind of
macabre joke. Solomon was the wisest of men, not for the legendary reason
given in the Book of Kings, but because he wrote Ecclesiastes and the
gloomier verses of the Book of Proverbs. Spiritual conviviality with
wondrous Solomon would be a meeting in a graveyard, where instead of
breaking bread together with him one would break green damp mould.


On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 1:39 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I agree, but I thought "break the green damp mould with" was fashioned
> after the phrase "to break bread with" as a humorous way of saying it. I
> could be totally wrong though.
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 7:03 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I think that "break the green damp mould" means to sit with Solomon...it
>> repeats with
>> this real image that man is not fitted to sit down on tomb-stones [even
>> some] so old
>> as to have green damp mould on them....
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 6:49 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> From Chapter 96:
>>>
>>> But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing
>>> grave-yards,
>>> and would rather talk of operas than hell;  calls Cowper, Young, Pascal,
>>> Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men;  and throughout a care-free
>>> lifetime
>>> swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is
>>> fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with
>>> unfathomably wondrous Solomon.
>>>
>>> What does "passing wise" mean here?
>>>
>>> Also, I assume "break the green damp mould with" means to "break bread
>>> with", but since Solomon is long dead, so there's only mould on the
>>> grave,
>>> is that correct?
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>>
>>