I want to feel:
I like the small moments more than the big ones.
The moment of private grief Ishmael must have had on that ship when he realized that Ahab doesn’t see the sea in the same wondering and loving way he does. I am often grieving over the realization that other people don’t experience the world in the way I do. (Maybe that’s for the best.)
The moment of wild intensity when Ahab is points a musket at Stub after Stub questions his decision to have the crew disregard the leaking oil muskets. I can’t tell which pain I would like to subject myself to more. I know for the moment he pulls away, and gives in, that I would like to be neither: that I would want to witness.
The moment Queequeg decides to copy his entire tattoos on his body onto the chest of the coffin. Tattoos, the etching quality, has become deeply entwined to Ishmael’s life since boarding the Essex. I’d like to be bewildered Ishmael as much as I would like to be manic Queequeg. I’ve been both many times. I think I can understand this distantly. So many things have become painfully relevant to my life since I came to Wells. It is easy to absorb the things people you are fond of love. Blue, bees, the word “buddy”, newspapers, Shakespeare, Nina Simone, Arizona raspberry teas, excessive journaling, whales. So much more. I wonder what my tattoo will be.
The moment Ishmael realizes that the sea attracts people that want to kill themselves but can’t reconcile it. Those thoughts are hard. No one talks about it. Those kinds of thoughts impair the heart, the mind. Those thoughts make it hard to do anything for a little bit. I’ve had many thoughts like that in class, or crying in the rain at Cornell, and I know I can’t really do anything successfully for a few hours.
The moment Ahab is mentally crafting the harpoon he needs to kill the White Whale. The hurried retelling to the blacksmith. I would love to feel what its like to obsessively try to explain a vision he has in his head. I wonder if that is excruciating for other people. The moment he eventally gets the harpoon back, and he has to cope with the fact it is not perfect, it is not exactly what he wants, and it could never be. Coping with the realization that even if he made the harpoon himself, it could never be an exact replica of the one in his mind. (Some things are best left in your head)







