Afternoons of Reverie: Books

Fire Is Catching

Friday, December 30, 2011 Mikentire 0 Comments Category : Books , Movies

Call Me Ishmael

Saturday, July 23, 2011 Mikentire 0 Comments Category : Books

Reading Moby-Dick was an interesting experience. It’s clearly an old book full of so much description it makes me want to die, but it explored some themes that were fascinating to me. The book opens up with one of the most famed lines in written history – “Call me Ishmael” – and from there our observant narrator takes us forth on one of the greatest, most tragic journeys ever written.

That first chapter for me holds more water than the rest of the book. And that’s in more sense than one. I love it because it takes about the inexplicable draw of the sea. There’s something about the ocean that just calls us to it. We love beaches, rocky shores, and long pondering walks about them. Something about seeing an infinite stretch of ever rolling water brings peace and guidance to our souls. Ishmael felt no differently.

“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.”

--Chapter I

“Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.”

--Chapter I

“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.”

--Chapter I

“There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seems to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.”

--Chapter CXI

I love the ocean and I too feel like Ishmael. To be near the sea without regularly visiting it seems terrible to me. Give me a day at the beach and I’ll be happy for quite some time!

Beautiful

But Moby-Dick goes beyond veneration of the sea. It glorifies the whale, and if you know me, you know I love that. There are several chapters detailing the magnificence of the whale, and although many of them are inaccurate due to the lack of knowledge at the time the novel was written, they still convey the greatness of these creatures.

“Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”

--Chapter CIV

The Sperm Whale

I find our relationship with whales interesting. I actually wrote a paper for my Environmental Humanities class on the subject. It seems as we – human society as a whole – have come closer to true environmental awareness, our relationships with cetaceans have changed as well to be reflective of our environmental ethic. If you’d like to read that paper, please click here, if not keep reading.

Several chapters of the novel are written in defense of whaling, its glories and virtues. And reading this book from the whaler’s point of view I can understand it a bit better (though I still don’t agree). Ishmael tells us that there is something to defeating the largest animals to have ever lived. And he also points out that what happened to the American Bison could never happen to the great Leviathans of the sea. In that time, a whaling ship would feel immensely proud to have taken 48 whales in a four-year period. If only Melville could see what would happen less than a century later.

As much as I love the things about the book that I’ve detailed here, they are not the main themes of the book. This classic novel mostly focuses on the fragility of life and the destructive forces of rage and revenge.

“All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever present perils of life.”

--Chapter LX

Captain Ahab takes center stage in the lesson on revenge. After having lost his leg in a previous battle with the white whale, he has become obsessed with its death. So much so, that he is willing to sacrifice the life of every person aboard the Pequod.

“All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.”

--Chapter XLI

And as the great ship sank, “A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego [one of the harpooners] there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

--Chapter CXXXV

The pursuit of Moby-Dick and the battle he fights could make for some epic movie scenes. And at the conclusion of the novel, we find nature going on as it has forever, and one lone survivor, our dear Ishmael floating in the sea waiting for death, when the Rachel, a ship whose captain lost his sons in a fight with the great white whale, solemnly approaches.

“On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”

--Epilogue

Moby Dick

The B&N Classics Challenge

Friday, July 22, 2011 Mikentire 0 Comments Category : Books

I LOVE reading classical literature. There is something so inspiring in reading the great works. One of my goals is to read through all the Barnes & Noble Classics. And there's quite a few of them.

So far I've gotten this far in my B&N Classics quest. I found this list on List of Bests and I decided posting them here would be a great visual way to record my progress

If it's bolded, I've read it. If there's a link on a title, you can read what I thought about it. A lot of these were read before my discovery of blogging, so they won't have a post, but who knows? Maybe I'll re-read them and post about them in the future.

1.	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2.	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
3.	The Aeneid by Vergil
4.	Aesop's Fables by Aesop
5.	The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
6.	Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
7.	Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
8.	The Ambassadors by Henry James
9.	Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
10.	The Arabian Nights
11.	The Art of War by Sun Tzu
12.	The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Other Writings by James Weldon Johnson
13.	The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction by Kate Chopin
14.	Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
15.	Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
16.	The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
17.	Beowulf
18.	Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville
19.	Bleak House by Charles Dickens
20.	The Bostonians by Henry James
21.	The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
22.	Bulfinch's Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch
23.	The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London
24.	Candide by Voltaire
25.	The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
26.	A Christmas Carol, The Chimes & The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens
27.	The Collected Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde
28.	The Collected Stories of Guy de Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant
29.	The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
30.	Common Sense and Other Writings by Thomas Paine
31.	The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
32.	The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
33.	The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 2 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
34.	Confessions by Saint Augustine of Hippo
35.	A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark J. Twain
36.	The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
37.	The Country of the Pointed Firs and Selected Short Fiction by Sarah Orne Jewett
38.	Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
39.	Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
40.	Daisy Miller and Washington Square by Henry James
41.	Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
42.	David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
43.	Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
44.	The Death of Ivan Ilych & Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
45.	The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper
46.	Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
47.	Dracula by Bram Stoker
48.	Emma by Jane Austen
49.	The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit
50.	Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson
51.	Essential Dialogues of Plato
52.	The Essential Tales And Poems of Edgar Allen Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
53.	Ethan Frome & Selected Stories by Edith Wharton
54.	Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
55.	Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
56.	Fathers and Sons by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
57.	The Federalist by Hamilton, Madison, Jay
58.	Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights by Jefferson, et al.
59.	The Four Feathers by A. E. W. Mason
60.	Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
61.	Germinal by Emile Zola
62.	The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
63.	Great American Short Stories : From Hawthorne to Hemingway
64.	The Great Escapes: Four Slave Narratives
65.	Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
66.	Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm
67.	Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
68.	Hard Times by Charles Dickens
69.	Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction by Joseph Conrad
70.	The Histories by Herodotus
71.	The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
72.	The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
73.	The House of the Dead and Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoevsky
74.	The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
75.	Howards End by E.M. Forster
76.	The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
77.	The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
78.	The Iliad by Homer
79.	The Importance of Being Earnest and Four Other Plays by Oscar Wilde
80.	Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
81.	The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
82.	The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
83.	Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
84.	Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
85.	Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
86.	Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
87.	The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
88.	The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
89.	Kim by Rudyard Kipling
90.	King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
91.	Lady Chatterly's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
92.	The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
93.	Leaves of Grass: First and "Death-Bed" Editions by Walt Whitman
94.	The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings by Washington Irving
95.	Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Peirre Choderlos de Laclos
96.	Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
97.	The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell
98.	Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
99.	Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
100.	Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac
101.	Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
102.	Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York by Stephen Crane
103.	The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
104.	Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
105.	Man and Superman and Three Other Plays by George Bernard Shaw
106.	The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
107.	Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
108.	The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
109.	The Metamorphoses by Ovid
110.	Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka
111.	Middlemarch by George Eliot
112.	Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
113.	Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
114.	The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
115.	My Antonia by Willa Cather
116.	My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
117.	Nana by Emile Zola
118.	Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth
119.	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass
120.	Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
121.	Night and Day by Virginia Woolf
122.	Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
123.	Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
124.	Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky
125.	O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
126.	The Odyssey by Homer
127.	Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
128.	Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
129.	The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
130.	Paradise Lost by John Milton
131.	The Paradiso by Dante Alighieri
132.	Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
133.	Persuasion by Jane Austen
134.	Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
135.	The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
136.	The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
137.	The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
138.	Poetics and Rhetoric by Aristotle
139.	The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
140.	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners by James Joyce
141.	The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky
142.	Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
143.	The Prince and Other Writings by Niccolo Machiavelli
144.	The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
145.	Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain
146.	The Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
147.	Pygmalion and Three Other Plays by George Bernard Shaw
148.	The Red and the Black by Stendhal
149.	The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Short Fiction by Stephen Crane
150.	Republic by Plato
151.	The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
152.	The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells
153.	A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
154.	Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
155.	Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum
156.	Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini
157.	The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
158.	The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
159.	The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
160.	The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
161.	Selected Stories of O. Henry by O. Henry
162.	Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
163.	Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
164.	Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
165.	Silas Marner and Two Short Stories by George Eliot
166.	Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
167.	Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen by Henrik Ibsen
168.	Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
169.	The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
170.	The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde & Other Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson
171.	Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
172.	A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
173.	Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
174.	Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
175.	Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
176.	This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
177.	Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
178.	The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
179.	Three Theban Plays by Sophocles
180.	Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
181.	The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
182.	Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
183.	Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson III
184.	The Turn of the Screw, the Aspern Papers and Two Stories by Henry James
185.	Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
186.	Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea by Richard Henry Dana
187.	Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
188.	Utopia by Sir Thomas More
189.	Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
190.	The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James
191.	Villette by Charlotte Bronte
192.	The Virginian by Owen Wister
193.	The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
194.	Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
195.	War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
196.	The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
197.	Ward No. 6 and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov
198.	The Waste Land and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot
199.	The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
200.	The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
201.	The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
202.	Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
203.	Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
204.	The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
205.	The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
206.	Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

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