Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

Moby-Dick 155flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whateverswift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any havenahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling,as of death, came over me. . . . My God! what is the matter with me?thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about. . . . In aninstant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying upinto the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and howgrateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, andthe fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!”“Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man!” Fire is idiosyncratic.It has a capricious, distorting intensity. It is the light of personalfeelings, that take the universal sorrow of life as personal grievance,and reason for personal rage. And “that way madness lies.” “There isa wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And thereis a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into theblackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible inthe sunny spaces.”The freedom of spirit, alike to plunge and to soar. Here we comeupon the significance of Ishmael’s escape in the coffin life-preserver,which is more directly rendered when Ishmael, or rather Melville,taking a suggestion from the vapour that hangs about a whale’s head“as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if heavenitself had put its seal upon his thoughts”—writes, “And so through allthe thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions nowand then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for thisI thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials,few along with them have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, andintuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neitherbeliever nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both withequal eye.”