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once; ‘but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ’em.’”
    and
               “His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the lineknife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby-Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.”
    August 1, 1819, New York City, a hot, dark night: Maria Melville, Herman’s mother, has, for the third time, gone down into the valley, and Herman, still unborn, struggling in the Dardanelles, the Narrows of a white woman, and perhaps, like the baby whales, “still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence”—Herman dies, to the extent that all life, all vitality retreats trunkward from one leg:—and then the “chopping Boy” is born.
               “. . . deep memories yield no epitaphs.” And yet, somewhere lies the thought: one must die to be born.
    P IERRE :
               “And here it may be randomly suggested . . . whether some things men think they do not know, are not for all that thoroughly comprehended by them; and yet, so to speak, though contained in themselves, are kept a secret from themselves? The idea of Death seems such a thing.”
    I SRAEL P OTTER :
               “It was not the pang of hunger then, but a nightmare originating in his mysterious incarceration, which appalled him. All through the long hours of this particular night, the sense of being masoned up in the wall, grew, and grew, and grew upon him . . . he stretched his two arms sideways, and felt as if coffined at not being able to extend them straight out, on opposite sides, for the narrowness of the cell . . . He mutely raved in the darkness.”
    W HITE -J ACKET :
               “Just then the ship gave another sudden jerk, and, head foremost, I pitched from the yard. I knew where I was, from the rush of the air by my ears, but all else was a nightmare . . .
                     “As I gushed into the sea, a thunder-boom sounded in my ear; my soul seemed flying from my mouth. The feeling of death flooded over me with the billows . . .
                     “For one instant an agonizing revulsion came over me as I found myself utterly sinking. Next moment the force of my fall was expended; and there I hung, vibrating in the mid-deep. What wild sounds then rang in my ear! One was a soft moaning, as of low waves on the beach; the other wild and heartlessly jubilant, as of the sea in the height of a tempest . . . The life-and-death poise soon passed; and then I found myself slowly ascending, and caught a dim glimmering of light.”
    Perhaps on that hot night in August, 1819, the unborn Herman lingered like Queequeg in his coffin,
                                             (a rehearsal of death that was all the cure the savage needed . . .
                                             (the same coffin, the death-box—unhinged from the sunken whaler—on which Ishmael ultimately survived . . .
    And we have this: the great, white, humped monster, that dismasted Ahab:
               “Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth . . .”
    There is again a split, a division of awareness, as earlier, at the dinner table, and for some time I am still, aware of my stillness, aware of my surroundings, of