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+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html>
+<head>
+<title>Moby Dick - Chapter 1. Loomings</title>
+</head>
+<body>
+ <h1>Moby Dick</h1>
+ <h2>Chapter 1. Loomings</h2>
+ <p>
+ Call me Ishmael. <span>Some <span>years</span></span> ago—never mind how
+ long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular
+ to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the
+ watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and
+ regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the
+ mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find
+ myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the
+ rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an
+ upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me
+ from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
+ people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I
+ can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical
+ flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.
+ There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in
+ their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings
+ towards the ocean with me.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves
+ as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf.
+ Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is
+ the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by
+ breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the
+ crowds of water-gazers there.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears
+ Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do
+ you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand
+ thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some
+ leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking
+ over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as
+ if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all
+ landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters,
+ nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green
+ fields gone? What do they here?
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and
+ seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the
+ extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder
+ warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as
+ they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of
+ them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys,
+ streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all
+ unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses
+ of all those ships attract them thither?
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take
+ almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale,
+ and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let
+ the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand
+ that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead
+ you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be
+ athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan
+ happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one
+ knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
+ quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of
+ the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees,
+ each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and
+ here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder
+ cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way,
+ reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue.
+ But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes
+ down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain,
+ unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go
+ visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade
+ knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there
+ is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would
+ you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of
+ Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate
+ whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a
+ pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy
+ with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to
+ sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such
+ a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out
+ of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the
+ Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this
+ is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of
+ Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he
+ saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image,
+ we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the
+ ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to
+ grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do
+ not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to
+ go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag
+ unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow
+ quarrelsome—don't sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves
+ much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though
+ I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a
+ Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to
+ those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable
+ toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as
+ much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships,
+ barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though
+ I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of
+ officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though
+ once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered,
+ there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say
+ reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous
+ dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse,
+ that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the
+ pyramids.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
+ plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True,
+ they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like
+ a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is
+ unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour, particularly if you
+ come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or
+ Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting
+ your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country
+ schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition
+ is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires
+ a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear
+ it. But even this wears off in time.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom
+ and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I
+ mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel
+ Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and
+ respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a
+ slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me
+ about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the
+ satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one
+ way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or
+ metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed
+ round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be
+ content.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying
+ me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I
+ ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there
+ is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act
+ of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two
+ orchard thieves entailed upon us. But <i>being paid</i>,—what will compare
+ with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really
+ marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root
+ of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven.
+ Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise
+ and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are
+ far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate
+ the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the
+ quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the
+ forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same
+ way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same
+ time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after
+ having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it
+ into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer
+ of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs
+ me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer
+ than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed
+ part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time
+ ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more
+ extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run
+ something like this:
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ "<i>Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.</i>
+ "WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. "BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the
+ Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others
+ were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy
+ parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot
+ tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I
+ think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being
+ cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about
+ performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it
+ was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating
+ judgment.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale
+ himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity.
+ Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the
+ undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending
+ marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to
+ my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been
+ inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for
+ things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous
+ coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and
+ could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is
+ but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one
+ lodges in.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great
+ flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that
+ swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul,
+ endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand
+ hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
+ </p>
+</body>
+</html>