Moby Dick Pod

"And so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free to fly." Flask and Stubb kill and whale and gossip about Fedallah and how much they think he's the devil. 

"That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad." Ishmael holds Queequeg vertically by a rope while he works on cutting up the whale and contemplates their connection. Some ginger tea gets brought out and tossed overboard. 

"lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen." The Pequod encounters another ship, The Jeroboam, which has been taken over by a madman religious fanatic who believes himself to be the archangel Gabriel.  

"That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations." The Whale is beheaded and Ahab asks the whale to speak. Which... the whale does not do. 

"Thus, while in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world." Thoughts on the death of a whale.

"Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own." Ishmael talks about the whale's skin and marvels at its ex...

"The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods." The sailors cut the blubber off of the whale. A gruesome sight.  

"These two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks*, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part." The nearby sharks want a piece of that whale and the sailors must keep them away by stabbing into the water. 

"Who is not a cannibal?" Stubb eats whale. Which may or may not be civilized. And why do we eat the things we do?  And who's to say? 

"If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil." Stubb teases and torments the ship's cook, Fleece, about the proper way to cook a whale steak. Fleece gives a sermon to the sharks down below. 

"Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters." We learn about a tool used by whalemen.  

"The vast majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them." We learn of the fortitude and superhuman strength of the harpooner. 

"Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened his flight." The title says it all.  

What is this book anyway? 

"All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life." Ishmael describes the horrors and subtleties of the whale-line.  

"Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!" A squid is mistaken for Moby Dick. 

" Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?" Ishmael pontificates on the cruel and unpredictable nature of  land, life, and the sea.

Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. Ishmael talks about other images of whales. 

From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies. Ishmael reviews different art and artists who have tried to capture whales in pictures.  

"Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan." Ishmael tells us how everyone does the Whale wrong. 

"The next instant the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale." In which Herman Melville needs an editor. Haha. Just kidding. A story heard from a person, who then repeated the story in his sleep and Ishmael overhears it, in which, a mutiny occurs on another ship named The Town-Ho, and after that some people get killed by Moby Dick an...

"In the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows." Ishmael tells us about the Gam, a tradition where sailors trade information and chit chat.  

"Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific Ocean!" The Pequod passes another ship, The Albatross and they attempt to brief conversation but nature seems to have other plans.  

"Beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm." The crew all witness a whale spout and there's the feeling like nature is personifying and turning against the ship. Probably nothing to worry about. 

" And all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end."   Ishmael ponders Ahab's phantom crew of whale hunters.