"There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves." --Moby-Dick (The Mast-Head)
So Ishmael muses from the mast-head, looking down. Arrived at the Continental Divide, the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons looks down from a "lofty bluff" above
the South Pass, likewise with ocean and infinity on his mind:
"A continent is spread beneath me: a new world in ocean-midst: the great ocean, at whose ever-heaving surge —
typing infinity — man trembled and forbore many thousand
years ...." --September 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army
Not only the conceit, but also the grammar is close to Melville's--as evidenced in the
hyphenated modifier "ever-heaving." Compounds with the intensifier "ever" occur dozens of times in Melville's
Pierre. Dozens, really? Let's count 'em. More than twenty-four, actually, since we ought to count "ever-interrupting and ever-marring world" as two.
- ever-shifting Nature
- ever-encroaching appetite for God.
- ever-sweet interpreter [Nature, again]
- ever-sacred being
- ever-interrupting and ever-marring world
- ever-growing business
- ever-adaptive sort of motive
- ever-present self
- ever-nameless
- ever-sacred memory
- ever-primeval wilderness
- ever-creative fire
- ever-recurring intervals
- ever-hospitable grave
- ever-creeping and condensing haze of ambiguities
- ever-abiding shadows
- ever-flowing
- ever-shifting shadowy vistas
- ever-welling mystery
- ever-shipwrecked character
- ever-increasing admiration
- ever-elastic regions of evanescent invention
- ever-devouring and omnivorous melancholy
- ever-baffled artist
And "ocean-midst" (another compound) recalls Pico as Melville had just described it a late chapter of his new novel.
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Mount Pico
José Luís Ávila Silveira/Pedro Noronha e Costa via Wikimedia Commons |
"Pierre is a peak inflexible in the heart of Time, as the isle-peak, Piko, stands unassaultable in the midst of waves." Pierre, or The Ambiguities (August 1852)
“More isles! more isles!” cried Babbalanja, erect, and gazing abroad. “And lo! round all is heaving that infinite ocean." --Mardi, and A Voyage Thither
