APS TOGETHER
Day 26
Moby-Dick by Herman MelvilleChapters 113-119
April 14, 2022 by Yiyun Li
“How can’st thou endure without being mad?” Only a mad man—Ahab or Lear—puts his bet on being mad. The saner, calmer, braver, more irreverent and more irrelevant ones among us: we endure.
“All this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.” This sentence brings me back to Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and its watery world.
To every Ahab and every Ishmael there is a Starbuck, the pragmatic believer: “Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”
