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

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speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I
will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled
ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in
their huge bake-houses the pyramids. No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple
sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there
to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me
jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first,
this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the van
Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just
previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a
country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The
transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the schoolmaster to a sailor,
and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin
and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What of it, if some old hunks
of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does
that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New
Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me,
because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular
instance? Who aint a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old
sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch me about, I
have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else
is one way or other served in much the same way -- either in a physical or
metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed

round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be
content. Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of
paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny
that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And
there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The
act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two
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thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, --what will compare with it? The
urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous,
considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly
ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how
cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition! Finally, I always go to sea as
a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle
deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds
from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for
the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second
hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but
not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many
other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But
wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant
sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this
the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance
of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way --he
can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling