Moby Dick, Chapter 28: Ahab

"There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunnnigly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam something made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he muttered--then, whoever should do the last office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.

So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of his overbearing grimness was owning to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that his ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw. 'Aye, he was dismasted off Japan.' said the old Gay-Head Indian once; 'but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of 'em.'

I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter-deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; 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. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe." (pp. 109-110)

Moby Dick, Chapter 27: Knights and Squires

"Third among the harpooners was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black negro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles." (pp. 107-108)

A beautiful life

I'm at Saint Louis Central Library, which is on Olive Street downtown. I am seated in one of the many book rooms holding various reference books with a nofiction stack spreading out to my left along the wall and in uniforms stacks at the back of the room. I am the back left or North East table with my back to the stacks, according to my orientation to the room. I am facing a central walk way between the 4 existing tables, each with 4 seats, a central lighting bar, and tabletop electrical outlets. To my right, at the North West table is a man with a stocking cap, a long dark beard, a worn out sweater, and a jacket hanging from his chair. The man is quietly engrossed in a book. It is early September. It is 87 degrees outside. This man is homeless.

He spends his days in this library I can surmise. He carries his possessions with him I suppose. And he's engrossed in an age-old practice, reading. He's not playing with a phone or reading magazines. He's engrossed in a book. At fleeting moments throughout his day as he reads I could imagine that he forgets that he may be hungry, he may have not showered in days, his total possessions are on his back or on the back of his chair, and he's swept away by the narrative of his book to someplace other than this. This man is unburdened by the risks of finance. This man is unburdened by house payments. The man has no address at which to receive bills or junk mail. At this moment, in this majestic building, this man lives a beautiful life.