Sublime

For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth.

Even to Pierre these two paintings had always seemed strangely dissimilar.

George Melville would serve as the Jeannette’s engineer. Said to be distantly related to the great author, Melville was an improvisational genius with machines—a greasy-fingered savant who seemed most at home among thumping boilers and sharp blasts of steam. The engineer, thirty-eight years old, had a booming voice, a stout physique, and an enormou

This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who. Now you are getting confused in the head, he thought. You must keep your head clear. Keep your head clear and know how to suffer

And if—though but unconsciously as yet—he was almost superhumanly prepared to make a sacrifice of all objects dearest to him, and cut himself away from his last hopes of common happiness, should they cross his grand enthusiast resolution;—if