Chapter XXVIII. Ahab.

Ahab has finally appeared.
Chapter 28 . Week 11 . Page 159.
. . . (of 135) . . (of 52) . . (of 655).

as you can see from my moleskin, my note taking and study is a little bit further behind, only chapter 18, than my reading; but reading this book when i was drawn to read this book, instead of reading when i was told to read this book, is making all the difference in my enjoyment and understanding of Moby-Dick.

and this going premeditatively slowly through the book is also highly beneficial. one chapter about every three days is allowing the re-reading and looking-up time of things that i do not know or do not understand or wonder about--which has been delightful.

daughter 3 gave me the black magnetic book clip with the white skull and crossbones on it (okay, she gave it after i threatened permanent banishment) but it now rests on every page as I read through. It has been a constant reminder of the nature of societies, even societies with less than ten members, and how they need to function together.

Even today as the risen sun shines slowly through the foggy mist outside my house windows it seems that nautical things have taken a hold of my life.

Captain Jack has been in my life, popular culture and today's young person's video watching pleasure. The watery coastal towns, wharves, lay lines, riggings, gunnels and cargo. I read on.
The Occupy Movement has come to Norfolk. The deal making and the deal breaking. The loyalty and the trust assumed, broken and otherwise. With a common questioning of "are they right in the head?" No good answer returns. I read on.
Whales and Moby-Dicks, of the every footed and non-footed kind have breached my shores, large dead blocking carcasses and smaller sculptural delights -- one never really knows which they will become -- friend or foe.
I flow around them or look upon them to discern which for me they might be. I read on.

'I' has traded his tame merchant-ship companies for a barbaric, heathenish, motley crew with a fierce uniqueness (pg 157). This makes me wonder whom i would choose to live among? The visually socially acceptable people with very few real necessary life skills or the rough handed carpenter or farmer with realistic time-honed survival skills. My thoughts turn to nearby Jamestown and those first horrible winters in Colonial America that killed so many there. Who would you choose to live among?

"...Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye." ~ Herman Melville. Moby-Dick. pg 159.

another hint that an experienced-filled life is the only real life.