Herman Melville, a Very Funny Man

I picked up Moby Dick for some research (you will see the results soon), and wound up browsing some other bits for the first time in years. Melville was pretty darned funny:

"Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles."

"The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place was..."

That's great: those torturous directions, followed by "Then ask somebody how to get there"!

Comments

  1. One of my favorite parts is just a little farther when they find out why the milk at the Try Pots tastes like fish.

    I'm reading this now actually... about halfway through.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, and the cow is standing in rotting fish heads on the beach, munching on fish remains!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

"Machine Learning"

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness