By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him;
but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot;
such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept
his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.
Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive
to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped
primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes;
and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps;
and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities,
Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects,
that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.
He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it;
and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity
is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason,
man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason,
is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised,
indifferent as his God.
For the rest blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common
in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then
be seen what like abandonment befell myself.
CHAPTER 94
A Squeeze of the Hand
That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought
to the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting
operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through,
even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.
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