Basstrap
ONE love, blood, life
- Joined
- Jul 6, 2000
- Messages
- 10,726
Everyone knows about Moby DIck, of course...I've heard about it all my life, so much that I just assumed it was just your typical adventure book.
But I'm actually reading it now and I would have no problems believing this is the best book ever written by an american author.
I wouldn't care if the whole book just talked about what he had for breakfast, it would still be the most enjoyable thing I've read in a long time.
just the way Melville writes is beautiful...like art. Books just don't feel like that anymore
When he describes water and the magic of it I could feel myself tearing up!
and by far the best retelling of the story of Jonah I've ever heard (chapter 9- the sermon)
there's also a great line:
"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunkan Christian"
Here's the water excerpt...great reading!
Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.
Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm wanting? --Water --there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?
and so forth it goes on
But I'm actually reading it now and I would have no problems believing this is the best book ever written by an american author.
I wouldn't care if the whole book just talked about what he had for breakfast, it would still be the most enjoyable thing I've read in a long time.
just the way Melville writes is beautiful...like art. Books just don't feel like that anymore
When he describes water and the magic of it I could feel myself tearing up!
and by far the best retelling of the story of Jonah I've ever heard (chapter 9- the sermon)
there's also a great line:
"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunkan Christian"
Here's the water excerpt...great reading!
Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.
Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm wanting? --Water --there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?
and so forth it goes on
mushrooms 
