“[...] at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they were. [ ]

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored harborless immensities… I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. — Moby-Dick, Ch. 32 #MelvilleMonday 🐳

When I recovered, I was finally able to hear the aria "Un bel di Vedremo," once again transported by a voice that seemed a celestial messenger. There were three discs inside, each one with a winged cherub on the Angel label. I labored over the difficult libretto, but in truth I didn't need to know the words of the aria. My mother had emptied the tip jar, no doubt sacrificing much. I remember all of this. My fiery desire to hear the music of Puccini coupled with my mother's deep understanding of how she could reach me through the barriers of a relentlessly burning fever. The wedding of art and sacrifice. That is how I returned to the world. PATTI SMITH, Bread of Angels

[Olivier] fell in love…with an idea as it was mottled with sunlight on that warm morning. Sophia would have said that he was touched with a remembrance of the divine, a faint recollection of the soul's origins before it fell to earth and inhabited a body. It seemed like a breathtaking idea, but was not as unique as he believed. Dante's Beatrice was scarcely a real person by the time he had reduced her to verse; Petrarch's Laura might not have existed at all except in his imagination. Both loved their lovers the more after they were dead, and could not disturb their imaginations with the onset of wrinkles or the annoyance of opinions independently expressed. IAIN PEARS, The Dream of Scipio

Shadow & Light Moby-Dick #MelvilleMonday

Ahoy, Shipmates & Friends ! Happy #MelvilleMonday ! 🐳 from Mardi ~ C 54 “Men of Mardi, I come from the sun. When this morning it rose and touched the wave, I pushed my shallop from its golden beach, and hither sailed before its level rays. I am Taji.”

#MelvilleMonday 🐳 #MobyDick Day Three dawns clear and fresh, and the narrative takes a breather. "What a lovely day again!" Ahab marvels. "[W]ere it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world." He then lapses into a soliloquy that echoes Melville's complaint to Hawthorne that he has rarely known the quiet circumstances required to produce proper creative writing. "Thinking is, or ought to be," Ahab says, "a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that." Here Melville touches on that dynamic tension between active and passive engagement. If the author simply sits back like God and casts judgment, the verdict is inevitably less than persuasive. What makes for good writing is when the author somehow achieves perspective within the tumult of the moment, and this is exactly what Melville accomplishes in Moby-Dick. NATHANIEL PHILBRICK, Why Read Moby-Dick?

1200 words added and time for a break. If any of my readers questioned the neighborhood I created in my novel "The Summer We Almost Painted the House", here is a headline, literally, from the Syracuse newspaper. The incident occurred a few blocks from where I grew up. Enjoy

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure. ERNEST HEMINGWAY, "With Pascin at the Dôme" #SundaySentence

#TolstoyReadalong ANNA KARENINA (P6, C8) Kitty, as always, was pained at having to be parted from her husband for two days, but seeing his animated figure, which seemed particularly big and strong in hunting boots and a white blouse, and with the glow of some hunting excitement incomprehensible to her, she forgot her own distress because of his joy and cheerfully said good-bye to him.

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.” Herman Melville

What could be finer than this? from Melville's PIERRE, his next after THE WHALE: “Smell I the flowers, or thee?” cried Pierre. “See I lakes, or eyes?” cried Lucy, her own gazing down into his soul, as two stars gaze down into a tarn. No Cornwall miner ever sunk so deep a shaft beneath the sea, as Love will sink beneath the floatings of the eyes. Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls. The eye is Love’s own magic glass, where all things that are not of earth, glide in supernatural light. There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers’ eyes.... archive.org/details/melville…

I 'merely' had some kind of blood cancer.... It's a cancer caused by the body getting old, starting to break down, and turn against its best interests. It's a cancer rooted in the universe's utter indifference. It's random, it has no significance – it's just the universe doing its stuff. Don't insert morality of purpose into its unrolling and denouement. JULIAN BARNES, Departure(s)

“Yeki bood. Yeki nabood.” That is how the world’s best storytellers always start: It was so. And it was not so. One of the few Persian phrases you can remember, from out of a whole childhood of your mother’s Persian phrases that you never paid attention to. Richard Powers

I didn't know then, of course, that I was about to be exiled from my imperfect circle, itself just exiled from its own enclosing circle, Mama's womb, the walls of which suddenly, less than a day before, began moving most violently and extremely. If I had been forewarned of all the troubles that were soon to befall me I would have stayed put. RICHARD FLANAGAN, Death of a River Guide

The industrial replacement of neighborhood by competition and technology moves everything worthy of love out of reach. WENDELL BERRY, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story

What a slow, thoughtful man the Monk had become. He'd always had a dogged sincerity, but this was deeper. His silences were searches. They were inspiring. "There's been a lie told. I've told it. I'm going to let the truth reclaim me. If I can't survive that process, so be it." DENIS JOHNSON, Tree of Smoke