We live in a kind of false paradigm of “self-reliance.” I don’t need to blame Waldo for this but perhaps he does bear a good bit of the burden for at the very least his…
Posts tagged moby dick
Power Agent in Repose
The previous post offers a kind of temperamental and philosophical comparison between two our most fecund writers and thinkers. The section out of Emerson is representative of both his power and his risible ambivalence. This…
The Dart’s the Thing: Melville on Emerson
“All men live enveloped in whale line.” Self-Reliance (Waldo) 1841 Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to…
Rights on Warship America
I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway… [so] that the muzzle which all men wore on their soul in the Elizebethan day, might not have intercepted Shakspers full articulations. For I hold…
Melville On Mind
…it has the savor of analogical probability. Chapter 73: STUBB AND FLASK KILL A RIGHT WHALE; AND THEN HAVE OVER HIM The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where…
The Money Virtue As American Rational Religion
The most virtuous and honest character in Dickens’ Hard Times, Stephen Blackpool, often confronts the confusion, ambiguity, paradox, and unfairness of “interests” with an aggrieved and exasperated cry that “it’s all such a muddle.” Even…
Empty Wonder Born On A Beach
I hope you’ll indulge me. Below are three “versions” of Chapter 14 of Moby Dick. The first is “after” Ronald Johnson’s, Paradise Lost (radi os), and so I try to excise the text to “leave”…
The Railroad Rides Upon Us: On the Pursuit of Uneventfulness
We embody a type of greatness. We are of capacity. We are of potential. And yet we are nearly entirely imbecilic in body and mind. Of what, on what, in what do we spend our…