"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as courses, and they come back to us as effects."
- Herman Melville
Who knew that the dude who wrote about catching a big ol' white whale was so smart?
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Thought for the day...
Posted by Shawn at 1:35 AM
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7 comments:
I like Melville in shorter excerts such as this...keeps my attention longer than Moby Dick ever did...
great quote!
Yeah...I start Moby Dick starts loosing it for me somewhere just after - "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world."
As a sociopath - i couldn't disagree with Mellville more.
It is so true. Everything we do can impact on others and then again on ourselves in ways we can barely imagine.
A thousand fibers connect us all? I'm a frayed knot. ;)
Melville was pretty brilliant in his shorter forms, like "The Tartarus of Maids".
There is an intersting phenomonon that I have been studying for a few years.
19th century American writers and poets, who (like Whitman) never say or read a word of Eastern philosophy whop reproduced its most basic tenets in their writing.
pnyc - That is so true. I think I've noticed it before, but never really clearly. Thanks for shining a light on that.
Now...I'm off to ponder how these writers and poets got all Eastern in the middle of Victorian and Edwardian social settings.
That is a weird phenomenon
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