moby-dick
What is it about Moby-Dick right now? First of all, there's been a new opera written (by Jake Heggie, composer of Dead Man Walking and The End of the Affair) and premiered in Dallas, based on that great American novel; and now I know several people who are all sitting down to read it, outside of any class assignment, just for fun.
A welcome development! In the 20th century, school classrooms did for Moby-Dick what school cafeterias did for spinach. The best way to refute both the critics and Miss Crabtree is to get into your favorite reading chair, get some good coffee/tea/whatever, and put yourself into the lap of a fantastic writer and thinker. I may do it myself. It's been a good 15 years or more.
One friend, reading it right now, has put a couple of quotes from it as her Facebook status; another was moved to quote the following passage in his Notes section:
A welcome development! In the 20th century, school classrooms did for Moby-Dick what school cafeterias did for spinach. The best way to refute both the critics and Miss Crabtree is to get into your favorite reading chair, get some good coffee/tea/whatever, and put yourself into the lap of a fantastic writer and thinker. I may do it myself. It's been a good 15 years or more.
One friend, reading it right now, has put a couple of quotes from it as her Facebook status; another was moved to quote the following passage in his Notes section:
Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye, — though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life, — in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: — through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
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