Word: whaled
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Back and forth, heads turning like it was a tennis match, there is no doubt that handfuls of hair were pulled out by almost every fan. Under the circumstances at the Yale Whale, a tie isn't too hard to handle...
This belief in restraint has roots in my faith. A few weeks ago, I heard two very important stories during the service. In the first, Jonah, a reluctant prophet recently released from a whale's belly preaches death and destruction to the city of Ninevah unless they repent. The city repents, is forgiven and is not destroyed. Jonah is furious at being made to look like a liar. God reminds the prophet that in anger, he has forgotten that life is not his to give and take--and there are a great many lives in Ninevah...
...Melville did not mean the heavens. He was inclined to look for an evil principle at work in the heart of things: at sea, the white whale, Moby Dick, would serve the purpose. Around his home in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, Melville had to strain himself to turn a locomotive into a dark metaphysic: "Hark! here comes that old dragon again--that gigantic gad-fly of a Moloch--snort! puff! scream!" "Great improvements of the age!" he wrote contemptuously. "Who wants to travel so fast? My grandfather did not, and he was no fool." Earlier in the 19th century, there...
...terrorist, in any case, dreams of such results. Any one of those suitcases on the conveyor belt is the seedpod of our death. The furniture really does conceal monsters. Each rental truck is an apocalypse idling at the curb. Each 747 takes on some unsettling metaphysic of Jonah-eating whale, or Moby Dick. Paranoia renders nature and its objects darkly volitional, satanic. The intent of terrorism, we know, is to break down the boundaries and sane categories of the mind and to make everyone start thinking like a psychotic...
...when I was living in the Jordan Co-op and reading Moby Dick (a dismal combination). It took me about two months to read, in which time I also re-read The Great Gatsby and plowed through endless fashion magazines to avoid sloshing in the tracks of the white whale. Although I'm an American history and literature concentrator, I have as yet evaded a re-reading of Melville's tome (sacrilege in many Harvard quarters), but I think Ahab's ghost may return to haunt me next year in 19th-century literature...