A On my entire obscene face there is something I’m trying to achieve. It is colorless. It is self-published. It is inner fatigue. It is so superfluous! It is part of an addiction I hate and depend on. It naturally enters into conversations. It will induce a kind of slow intuition. It will be sloppy and corrugated. It will smell pleasant. It will be animals playing on a farm. It will be completely alone. It will not be so bad. It will be missing out. It will have a vague sense of relief. It will be committing without action. It will be floating on the surface of everything. It will be an amorphous tedium. It will be sleep. It will be a party. It will be a good lunch and supper. It will be a whole day and night. It will be an indefinite field full of universal life. It [...]
Herman Melville doesn’t announce the ambition of directly. He kind of sneaks it in. It comes in late and sideways. At the start the feeling is almost haphazard, and Ismael says, as if in afterthought, “I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery parts of the world.” It’s imagined as a minor event in “the grand programme of Providence,” a little headline lost between “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States” and “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.” When the ambition is announced, it’s done almost obliquely. It’s done as if the narrator had lingered a little longer than necessary in the library, hoping somebody else would write the book so he wouldn’t have to: “As yet, however,” he says, “the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature … As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I [...]