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.
The Captain, whose discernment detected crime but whose cupidity exposed only the penniless, charged thrice the usual fare. Jonah paid without protest. He descended to his cramped cabin beneath the water-line, where the ceiling rested almost on his forehead. A swinging lamp oscillated from the axis, and as the ship heeled, the lamp maintained its obliquity—infallibly straight itself, it revealed the false, lying levels of the room. “Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!” Jonah groaned. “Straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!” His ponderous misery dragged him drowning down to sleep.
The ship cast off—the first recorded smuggler, Jonah its contraband. But the sea rebelled. A dreadful storm struck, planks thundering with trampling feet. Jonah slept his hideous sleep until the master’s cry: “What meanest thou, O sleeper! Arise!” He staggered to the deck and saw the bowsprit pointing wildly between sky and tormented deep. The sailors, certain of his guilt, cast lots. The lot fell on Jonah. He confessed: a Hebrew, fleeing the Lord God of heaven. He told them to cast him overboard. Mercifully they turned away, but the gale howled louder. They laid hold of Jonah and dropped him into the sea. Instantly calm spread from the east.
In the whale’s belly, Jonah prayed—not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. This was true repentance. God delivered Jonah from the sea. Sin not, Mapple warned, but if you do, repent like Jonah.
Then Mapple turned the lesson upon himself. God had laid one hand upon the congregation; both hands pressed upon him. As a pilot-prophet burdened with preaching unwelcome truths to a wicked world, he felt the weight. Woe to the preacher who seeks to please men rather than God, who pours oil upon waters God has brewed into a gale, who preaches truth while being himself a castaway.
Yet from woe came delight. Mapple’s face lifted, eyes shining with deep joy. On the starboard hand of every woe, he cried, there is a sure delight, higher than the woe is deep. Delight to him who stands forth his own inexorable self against the proud gods of this earth. Eternal delight to him who can say with his final breath: I have striven to be Thine more than this world’s. Mapple waved a benediction, covered his face, and remained kneeling until the chapel was empty.
Returning to the Spouter-Inn, Ishmael finds Queequeg alone before the fire, whittling his small idol with absorbed attention. The harpooneer then takes up a book and counts its pages with deliberate regularity, pausing at every fiftieth to whistle in apparent astonishment—a ritual both childlike and mysterious.
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