the sea, the land, and other observations from South Bend

So here I am in South Bend, Indiana, between the Great Lakes, which were once ice shelves, and the vast expanse of suburbia that was once prairie.

Sarah, if you're out there (Sarah is also away on a trip), tell us more about this obsession with prairies!

Chapter 58 ("Brit") compares two seemingly endless vistas: the sea, and long fields of waving grass or wheat. Nice little micro-poem he creates with this metaphor. Then we hear about the ways in which this analogy does NOT hold up: the sea is not so like the land, after all. "Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one." Superficial? Compared to what?

225: "Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as theis appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"

Translation/gloss, anyone?

"Monstrous Pictures. . . "

217-218: "Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait." Anyone who's ever been whale-watching and seen an elusive fluke or tail, with a hint of a shadow of the rest of the animal's bulk, would agree.

You can only see the totality of a whale if you're under the sea, in the whale's own element, and this is out of the realm of human possibility (at least before modern dive gear--hey, it's 1851 here). Out of the whale's element, if you expose him to the air, "his precise expression the devil himself could not catch."

So . . . the decipherability, the readability, of a thing depends on seeing it in its proper element. But the catch is: it's impossible to be in that element. Our perspective, because it's coming from a standpoint "outside," will be skewed. Is this problem of observation, this limitation on what we can know, what makes the whale so particularly interesting to Ishmael/Melville? Or could the same be said about anything that's observed?

"The great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last."