It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night...

Ceteology.

*Cetology
Not a word I write daily.

>scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery

Holy awesome alliteration atman : 21 words (not counting a), 12 of them starting with s

>not the burning ships in the try-works chapter
>not a squeeze of the hand
fucking plebeian.

Loomings

>the blackness of darkness

>Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!

>And like the hand of god, the sun pulled the sky down with the determination of the degrading clouds, becoming polluted by the darkness that would loom for the rest of man's desire.

Probably one of my favorite lines.

>Dead white men

The Try Works
The Castaway

>try-works
my man. fucking haunting.

The Whiteness of the Whale or Ahab's final speech with Starbuck before the chase.

Stubb's Supper is pretty funny

Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

.

That part about the whales eyes and their garden of sexual pleasure, love-making and baby breast-feeding is indeed a sublime work of poetry. But the best master of language is not Dante, but Shakespeare: nothing on literature compares with his poetic imagination and metaphorical luxury and lust.

>chapter with the whale shrine.

This desu. That was when it hit me that I am reading the best thing I have ever read.

The Lee Shore

''When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!''

>live white whale

Pequod meets the Virgin
The part when they kill the grand old whale. That hit me hard. I was listening to whale sounds to get into the mood and fucking cried some manly tears for the majestic leviathan.

>"For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and the other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all."

>"Seen from the Pequod's deck, then, alas she would rise on a high hill of the sea, this host of vapory spouts, individually curling up into the air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height."

>“He turns and turns him to it,—how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homiage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!—Oh that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights. Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most candid and impartial seas...here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way."

The sperm squeezing one.
>tfw you'll never squeeze tubs of sperm with your shipmates getting silky smooth hands in the process

I wouldn't say better than joyce because well, they are obviously very different and because i'm not the one to say, but still.. Moby Dick's prose is GOAT.

Any other English prose that's on this level?

Thomas Browne, but his style is a bit older. If you're into that, like I am, he is great.