This Glorious Ocean Life

Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

–Herman Melville

“Call me Ishmael.” They may be the most famous opening words of any English-language novel, but read just a little bit further into Moby-Dick and you’ll be rewarded with stirring descriptions of “the watery part of the world” so many of us seek out this time of year.

Herman Melville was born on this day in 1819. In honor of his birthday–and because we like writing by the sea (“loveliness unfathomable,” in Melville’s words) during these hazy, water-gazing, lazy days of summer, we offer a little bit more of Melville’s masterpiece.

Happy meditating.

If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings toward the ocean with me… 

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon… What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all over the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated up the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! Here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive.  Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremist limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
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Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

--Herman Melville
Moby-Dick, or, The Whale