COLUMBUS: “In the dead of night, while I was on deck, I heard an awful roaring that came from the south, toward the ship; I stopped to observe what it might be, and I saw the sea rolling from west to east like a mountain, as high as the ship, and approaching little by little; on the top of this rolling sea came a mighty wave roaring with a frightful noise, and with all this terrific uproar were other conflicting currents, producing, as I have already said, a sound as of breakers upon the rocks. To this day I have a vivid recollection of the dread I then felt, lest the ship might founder under the force of that tremendous sea . . .”
and Las Casas: “. . . since the force of the water is very great at all times and particularly so in this season . . . which is the season of high water, . . . and since it wants naturally to get to the sea, and the sea with its great mass under the same natural impulse wants to break upon the land, and since this gulf is enclosed by the mainland on one side and on the other side by the island . . . and since it is very narrow for such a violent force of contrary waters, it must needs be that when they meet a terrific struggle takes place and a conflict most perilous for those that find themselves in that place.”
The house, the attic, are once more become a ship, but in a different sense, that of a ship struck at different points by contending waters, so that it shivers, the timbers work against one another, and the whole seems scarcely to move. I am still, and it is some moments before I realize that this sensation comes to me, not as from the timbers of the house, but as from those—the rafters, joists, sills, and sleepers—of my own frame . . . my bones being of oak, carved and pegged (the club left as a trademark, unwhittled)—an oaken frame somehow assaulted. I am cramped, unable to move . . .
MOBY-DICK: “For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled hearthstone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.”
“But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers.”
“One of those little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied . . . where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow.”
Sitting cramped, I recall the maternity hospital where, three times, I have taken Linda to produce: the old building, crowded and outdated; the various corridors leading, like the spokes of a wheel, to the hub, the labor and delivery rooms—corridors filled with grunting, sweating, and sometimes screaming women; the labor room itself often hurriedly converted for a delivery—the building charged with haste and effort to cope with the mighty postwar tide of infants, rushing down the corridors, thrusting into the world.
Again, I am assaulted, the sensation this time largely in my head. There is a sense of separation, the skull, like a case, holding firm under attack, and the brains, separate, trapped within—struggling and pushing . . . I attempt to scream, but the action of throat muscles, as of all else, is suspended, and I am left with silence . . .
(Melville, describing the pyramids: “A feeling of awe & terror came over me. Dread of the Arabs. Offering to lead me into a sidehole. The Dust. Long arched way,—then down as in a coal shaft. Then as in mines, under the sea. (At one moment seeming in the Mammoth Cave. Subterranean gorges, & c.) The stooping & doubling . . .”
Thrusting my body back full length in the chair, I try to break the enclosure, the cramp—but there is no change: each position, each arrangement of trunk, head, and limbs, becomes ultimate, a final one, from which my frame would become a thing made, without life.
Shifting again, unable to create Space, I try to reach with awareness alone, to grasp and control Time . . . and am reminded at once of childhood, when I slipped and fell into the posthole: alone at the end of the corn field, with earth all around me, rising to beyond the top of my head—there is again the dizziness, the volatile awareness, expanding in proportion to my confinement, and the loneliness, the waiting . . .
MOBY-DICK: “Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were then ranged around the sides within: a flask of fresh water was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail cloth being rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view. ‘Rarmai’ (it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be replaced in his hammock.”
and BARTLEBY: “The yard was entirely quiet. It was not accessible to the common prisoners. The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off all sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew underfoot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein by some strange magic, through the clefts grass seed, dropped by birds, had sprung.
“Strangely huddled at the base of the wall—his knees drawn up, and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones—I saw the wasted Bartleby. But nothing stirred. I paused; then went close up to him; stooped over, and saw that his dim eyes were open; otherwise he seemed profoundly sleeping. Something prompted me to touch him. I felt his hand, when a tingling shiver ran up my arm and down my spine . . .”
and there was Navidad: first toehold, first bit of land secured and colonized, in the New World: the inhabitants, to a man, wiped out . . .
Waiting now, the very quality of it sinking in me, so that waiting becomes a kind of desperation, hopelessness, I remain huddled, cramped and desolate, as though dead . . .