why can't you forget the past?

 SCENES BEYOND THE WESTERN BORDER

"Why ever look behind, and cherish the unhappy, profitless past? Why hug delusion and disappointment to the soul?"

"Ask the pale plant," I replied, "why it stretches forth in darkness, toward the ray of light."

--Scenes Beyond the Western Border - May 1853; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857)

  BENITO CERENO

"... But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves."

"Because they have no memory," he dejectedly replied; "because they are not human."  

--Putnam's Monthly Magazine - December 1855; and The Piazza Tales (1856).

grim warriors and ghosts

"I loved to yield myself up to the fanciful superstition of the islanders, and could almost believe that the grim warrior was bound heavenward. . . ."  (Typee)

over that grim warrior's grave  (Mardi)

"On that very camp-bedstead, there, beneath his tent on the field, the glorious old mild-eyed and warrior-hearted General had slept, and but waked to buckle his knight-making sword by his side; for it was noble knighthood to be slain by grand Pierre; in the other world his foes' ghosts bragged of the hand that had given them their passports."  (Pierre)

" 'tis enough to disturb the ghosts of the grim old warriors...."
Scenes Beyond the Western Border and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

astronomy from the plains

Has it never occurred to you, Friend, that we ought to be astronomers?—the science came from desert plains.

Friend.  Yes, and botanists too; I think no one can be on the prairies without observing much, the motions of the stars.
(Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

"Then, to study the stars upon the wide, boundless sea, is divine as it was to the Chaldean Magi, who observed their revolutions from the plains."  (White-Jacket)

That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings, is only because we ourselves are greater miracles, and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space. Wonder interlocks with wonder; and then the confounding feeling comes. No cause have we to fancy, that a horse, a dog, a fowl, ever stand transfixed beneath yon skyey load of majesty. But our soul's arches underfit into its; and so, prevent the upper arch from falling on us with unsustainable inscrutableness. "Explain ye my deeper mystery," said the shepherd Chaldean king, smiting his breast, lying on his back upon the plain; "and then, I will bestow all my wonderings upon ye, ye stately stars!"  (Pierre)

living by the light of philosophy, refracted

Did I dream ?—Had I slumbered at my post ?—I did dream.

And why not tell my dream?—Life is little better; nay, it is little different. We wander at most in the dark—stumbling on temptations,—walking on the thorns of passions; or in an awful, but obscure light, refracted by the cloudy medium of philosophy.

Scenes Beyond the Western Border and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Spoken by Babbalanja, a "speculative, moralizing philosopher":

"The mystery of mysteries is still a mystery....Oh, my lord, I am in darkness, and no broad blaze comes down to flood me. The rays that come to me are but faint cross lights, mazing the obscurity wherein I live."  (Mardi)

walls to sympathy

Sleep on, my Friend! Though I would question you if I could, in this dark hour, if sympathy may ever pass the mysterious boundary of dream-land;—if that deathlike seeming calm were of careless oblivion,—or of some divine despair....
 

Are these wild mountains impassable barriers [1853:  "mountains like prison-walls"], that must prison all sympathy from earthly communion?  (Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

"When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness!"  (Moby-Dick)

going down to posterity

"... dumb beasts prefer death to slavery!  Liberty lost, they can die without the excitement of the world's applause, or hopes of a grateful posterity!"  (March 1853)

Melville on Cooper:

"He was a great, robust-souled man, all whose merits are not even yet fully appreciated.  But a grateful posterity will take the best of Care of Fenimore Cooper."  (December 1851)

 Melville on Melville:

My dear Sir, they begin to patronize. All Fame is patronage. Let me be infamous: there is no patronage in that. What “reputation” H.M. has is horrible. Think of it ! To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a “man who lived among the cannibals”! When I speak of posterity, in reference to myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost. I shall go down to some of them, in all likelihood. Typee will be given to them, perhaps, with their gingerbread. 
(Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, early May 1851)

riddle, cipher, mask

Looking closer at the criticism of G. P. R. James quoted in the last post, we can't help but notice how trenchantly our Captain of U. S. Dragoons breaks down the plot and characters in the novel by Melville's neighbor. And how all the key terms are exampled in Melville's writings.

"The hero is a lad of seventeen; old enough to fall in love, and but little else. St. Medard is a mere abstraction, De Langy a cipher, Artonne a riddle, Monsieur L. a man in a mask who puts himself in the way sufficiently to give some interesting trouble and help out the plot." --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, Southern Literary Messenger 18 (January 1852): 49; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army. Spelled "cypher" in the 1852 magazine version; "cipher" in the 1857 book version.

LAD OF

"... a lad of about sixteen" (Redburn)

"...a lad of Pierre's own age." (Pierre)

ABSTRACTION

"...far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate…” (Moby-Dick)

“I keep my love for it in the lasting condition of an untried abstraction.” (The Confidence-Man)

A RIDDLE

"His ruminations were a riddle." (Mardi)

“Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold.” (Moby-Dick)

"thou wert a riddle to me…” (Pierre)

“In short, the entire ship is a riddle.” (The Confidence-Man)

A CIPHER (CYPHER)

“The captain—a mere cipher—was an invalid in his cabin;” (Omoo)

“that man, to others, too often proves a cipher.” (Mardi)

“He who on all hands passes for a cypher today, if at all remembered hereafter, will be sure to pass for the same.” (Mardi)

IN A MASK

“In a mask, he dodges me.” (Mardi)

“I am the Vailed Persian Prophet; I, the man in the iron mask; I, Junius.” (Mardi)