英語聽書《白鯨記》第27期

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAINEZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows of his boat waskilled by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan,AUGUST 3d, 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to hisMemory BY HIS WIDOW.

Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat andjacket, I seated myself near the door, and turningsideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me.Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was awondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in hiscountenance. This savage was the only personpresent who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read,and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of therelatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, Iknew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did severalwomen present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feelsure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of thosebleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.

Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these.What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair inthose immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines thatseem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelesslyperished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.

In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that auniversal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets thanthe Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, weprefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks forthe remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeituresupon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet liesantique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to becomforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why allthe living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb willterrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathersher most vital hope.

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regardedthose marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate ofthe whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. Butsomehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion,it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in thisbusiness of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But whatthen? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that whatthey call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at thingsspiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking thatthick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In facttake my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; andcome a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.