#Poring over dead attenuated skeletons and trying through them to comprehend the uncomprehendable | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

saints-who-never-existed · 11 months ago

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"In Moby Dick, Ishmael tells of seeing the skeleton of a sperm whale assembled in a grove of palm trees on a South Pacific island. "How vain and foolish," He says, "for timid untraveled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton... Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out."

But, as the survivors of the Essex came to know, once the end has been reached and all hope, passion, and force of will have been expended, the bones may be all that are left.

- In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick.

#Just finished the book and thought not only that this parting line went hard as fuck #But also that it's applicable in so many ways to another maritime disaster with which we're all acquainted #The Expedition's inability to understand and contend with the raw might of the Arctic itself #Their inability to understand themselves and their own human animal nature until in the direst straits of peril and suffering #And then us in turn - modern archaeologist and modern audience alike #Poring over dead attenuated skeletons and trying through them to comprehend the uncomprehendable #Examining the animal femurs ascribed to saints who never existed - if you will #Quote #In the Heart of the Sea

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