I look deep down
by chuckofish
We all have our pensive moods.
And when we do, it’s a good thing to have our quote books at the ready…
“Oh, grassy glades! oh ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though long parched by the dead drought of the earthly life,— in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:— through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.”
And the same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:–“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!–Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”
–Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
We can also go to YouTube and line up our favorite movie scenes. Recently I saw someone’s list of the five best speeches in film. You can imagine what was on it: Jack Nicholson In A Few Good Men, Mel Gibson in Braveheart, Russell Crowe in Gladiator and so on. Ho hum.
These are the five that came immediately to my mind:
Gregory Peck in Twelve O’Clock High…
Olivia de Havilland in The Adventures of Robin Hood…
John Wayne in The Searchers…
Burl Ives in The Big Country…
Gene Hackman in Hoosiers…
Watch them all–they’re short. They’re like quotes from Moby-Dick. They whet your appetite for the whole great thing. And they remind you why you are on this journey in the first place.
For the victory of battle standeth not in the multitude of an host; but strength cometh from heaven.
–1 Maccabees 3:19
And here’s one more, for good measure. Leslie Howard in The Petrified Forest:
dual personalities 