"Melville, Herman - Moby-Dick or The White Whale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Melville Herman)

of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his
feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in
all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert,
try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical
professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the
Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with
a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps
his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a
sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to
overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though
the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs
like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the
shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the
Prairies in June,
..


when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what
is the one charm wanting? --Water --there is not a drop of water there! Were
Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see
it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls
of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or
invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every
robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other

crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you
yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your
ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea
holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove?
Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that
story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image
he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same
image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the
ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. Now, when I say
that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the
eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it
inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you
must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something
in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick --grow quarrelsome --don't sleep of
nights --do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing; --no, I never go as a
passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a
Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of
such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable
respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is
quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of
ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook, --
though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of
officer on ship-board --yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls; --though
once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered,
there is no one who will