Call me Ishmael. Years ago, finding myself poor and aimless on land, I decided to sail and view the watery world. This is my method for curing melancholy and regulating my blood. Whenever my mouth grows grim, or my soul feels like a damp, drizzly November, I know it is time to leave. The urge becomes undeniable when I pause before coffin before warehouses, trail behind funerals, or feel a manic impulse to knock hats off in the street. Going to sea is my alternative to suicide. While Cato died on his sword with a flourish, I quietly board a ship. This impulse is not unique; almost all men feel a magnetic pull toward the ocean.
At sea, the work lives. A whaling ship mans her three mast-heads from first light to last, seamen taking two-hour turns as they do at the helm. In tropical waters the duty becomes something close to pleasure. A hundred feet above the decks, the look-out straddles the deep on what feel like giant stilts while the largest creatures on earth swim beneath his feet. The trade winds blow drowsy and warm. No newspapers arrive with their alarms, no domestic cares intrude, no anxious thoughts of dinner disturb a mind sustained for years by casked provisions.
Yet the perch itself offers scant comfort. The sailor stands on two thin sticks called the cross-trees, tossed by the sea, as exposed as a man balanced on a bull’s horns. A watch-coat provides no real shelter—it clings like an extra skin but cannot house a man’s body any more than flesh can house a wandering soul. Ishmael envies the Greenland whalers their crow’s-nests, those sheltered pulpits equipped with lockers and racks and even a rifle for Captain Sleet to pot passing narwhals. The southern fisherman enjoys fairer weather but must endure his elevation with nothing but his own two legs for support.
Ishmael confesses he kept poor watch. With the problem of the universe revolving inside him at that thought-engendering height, how could he attend to the standing orders? He warns Nantucket ship-owners against hiring hollow-eyed young Platonists who ship with philosophy rather than navigation in their heads. Such melancholy youths, fleeing earth’s cares for the fishery, will tow a vessel round the globe without filling a single cask. They see no whales because they have ceased looking.
The danger runs deeper than failed voyages. In that opium-like trance induced by rhythm and reverie, the young philosopher’s identity dissolves. His spirit mingles with the infinite ocean until, like Cranmer’s scattered ashes, it forms part of every shore worldwide. He exists only through the ship’s borrowed motion—until some slip or startle snaps him back. Then identity returns in horror, and all too often the dreamer plunges through transparent air into the summer sea, lost forever. Heed it well, Ishmael warns—there is death in that pantheistic dream.
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