Word: pequod
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...only one of a thousand. Their normal humanity, not their madness or mindlessness, stands out, their journey with undimmed belief from America and into the jungle. It all leads inexorably and even naturally to final dissolution in some unmapped region--just as the hard-bitten crew of the Pequod rowed fearfully yet willingly under the raging Ahab, to the great white whale, to the end of the absolutist quest. How can we so easily write them...
...mahogany and brass telescope points upward in the center of this decaying elegance. It smells of ships; between it and the white, wooden dome the room seems a reassembling of some old dismantled Pequod. Wolbach stumps to the door leading out to the roof, then turns looking back, up at the white curve. "They say this was built by a shipwright, a man who built whaling boats," he says. "But it leaks...
...appreciate his achievement, it is desirable, but not necessary, to have read the novel. By cultural osmosis, even the nonreader knows the basic story. The opening line, "Call me Ishmael," sounds a ghostly summoning bell on everyman's ship, Pequod, "a noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy...
...such as Melville's, one scarcely needs a Devil. He, like Hawthorne, might have taken for his text Jonathan Edwards' fearsome sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It is those hands, and not Moby Dick's great maw, that finally engulf Pequod and its doomed captain and crew...
...were obsessively driving it to a suicidal reunion with an evil deep in its own nature. The astronauts reasserted the chief mate Starbuck's cool, professional sanity. Not intellect, but intelligence. Not evil, but remediable errors, course corrections, chatter from Capcom to Houston. In the Middle American version, the Pequod steers for home: Moby Dick is a holdful of whale oil for the nation's lamps...