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.
This quality emerges most vividly when whiteness attaches itself to objects already terrible. The polar bear and the white shark would be fearsome creatures regardless, but their pale coloring transforms them into something far worse. Their smooth, colorless aspect lends them a repulsive gentleness, as though their savagery wore a mask of heavenly purity. The contrast chills the blood more than any tiger’s stripes. The albatross, too, sails through imagination wrapped in clouds of spiritual dread, its ghostly plumage suggesting secrets too profound for speech. Ishmael recalls seeing one brought aboard during an Antarctic gale—a regal, unspotted creature that seemed to him like an archangel, its strange eyes holding mysteries that touched on God himself.
The White Steed of the Prairies illustrates how whiteness can clothe a creature in divinity while simultaneously inspiring awe that borders on fear. This magnificent wild horse, leader of countless herds, seemed to the Indians who revered him an apparition from an unfallen world. Yet his spiritual pallor commanded not only worship but also a trembling dread.
In other contexts, whiteness loses even this ambiguous glory and becomes purely loathsome. The albino man, though sound in body and limb, repels the eye and sometimes his own family. His all-pervading pallor makes him more hideous than any deformity. Nature herself wields this hue as a weapon: the White Squall earns its name from its snowy aspect, and history records how the White Hoods of Ghent masked their murderous purpose in the same color. Most fundamentally, the marble pallor of the dead appalls us more than any wound. From this we derive the white shroud, and from this we dress our ghosts in milk-white fog. Even Death, in the evangelist’s vision, rides a pale horse.
Certain places exert a spectral power through their whiteness. The White Tower of London haunts the imagination more than its neighboring fortresses. The White Mountains of New Hampshire cast a giant ghostliness over the soul, while the Blue Ridge evokes only gentle dreams. The city of Lima, wrapped in perpetual white, seems stricken by a rigid apoplexy that preserves her ruins in eternal pallor. To the imaginative mind, whiteness serves as the chief agent in magnifying terror. A sailor hearing breakers at night feels sharpened vigilance, but a midnight sea of milky whiteness strikes him with superstitious horror, as though he sailed through a boundless graveyard of ice.
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