Not P but Moby-Dick (75)

[Mark Kohut]

okay.....I would still argue it is a metaphorical associative allusion to
'breaking bread'.....
since there can be little meaning to "green damp mould" as edible....

On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 3:06 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>>>>
>>>