That’s Dave’s well-worn, dog-eared paperback copy of “Moby Dick” from the 1980s. Perhaps the most quotable book of all time.
Why not make a New Years resolution to finally read Herman Melville’s classic “Moby Dick”?
Learn about Ishmael, Queequeg the harpooner, “a Catskill eagle”, and why “Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.”
“Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass;
accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly.
To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames,
the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!”
“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.
And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”
From “The Try-Works,” Chapter 96 of Melville’s Moby-Dick.