Moby Dick

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip,
suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned,
and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away,
and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's
ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably.
By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him;
but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot;
such, at least, they said he was.  The sea had jeeringly kept
his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.
Not drowned entirely, though.  Rather carried down alive
to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped
primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes;
and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps;
and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities,
Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects,
that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.
He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it;
and therefore his shipmates called him mad.  So man's insanity
is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason,
man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason,
is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised,
indifferent as his God.

For the rest blame not Stubb too hardly.  The thing is common
in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then
be seen what like abandonment befell myself.



CHAPTER 94

A Squeeze of the Hand



That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought
to the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting
operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through,
even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.

While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed
in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm;
and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully
manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.

It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when,
with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine's
bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps,
here and there rolling about in the liquid part.
It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid.
A sweet and unctuous duty!  No wonder that in old times this
sperm was such a favorite cosmetic.  Such a clearer! such
a sweetener! such a softener; such a delicious mollifier!
After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt
like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter
exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship
under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed
my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues,
woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers,
and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes
their wine; as.  I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,--
literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets;
I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow;
I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm,
I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit
the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue
in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath,
I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice,
of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed
that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed
that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me;
and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers'
hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.
Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did
this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing
their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally;
as much as to say,--Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer
cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor
or envy!  Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us
all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves
universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!
For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences,
I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower,
or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity;
not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy;
but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle,
the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this,
I am ready to squeeze case eternally.  In thoughts of the
visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise,
each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.


Now, while discoursing of sperm it behooves to speak of other things akin
to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.