Status Updates From Billy Budd and Other Tales ...

So far I've read Billy Budd, The Piazza and Bartleby and I gotta say, I really love Melville's prose style. Sentences unfold with a beauty and complexity that is wonderfully lyrical and often have to be read a few times to get the full sense of their description, which really immerses you in the language. This is the first Melville I've read and it won't be the last.

But Time's moments keep descending upon the quietest hour...In hard, rude natures especially such as have passed their lives amid the elements, farmers and sailors, the animal Decay affects the memory by casting a haze over it, not seldom it softens the heart and drowsing the conscience in a center otherwise

A sailor's name as it appears in a crew list is not always his real name nor he never instance does it indicate his country

Though John Marr's Shipmates could not all have departed life, yet as subjects of meditation they were like Phantoms of the Dead. They became spiritual companions losing something of their first indistinctness and putting on the dim semblance of mute life; they were lit by that auerola circling over any object of the affection in the past for reunion with which an imaginative heart passionately yearns...

Hooped around by a level rim, the Prairie was to John a reminder of ocean...

John Marr from Boyhood up to maturity a sailor under diverse Flags disabled at last from further Maritime life by a crippling wound eventually betakes himself for a livelihood to less active employment ashore. There, he transfers his rambling disposition acquired as a Seafarer

(This reminds me of my rambling seafarer ex..)

At last he began to laugh at his former forebodings and laugh at the strange ship for in its aspect someway siding with them as it were; laugh too at the odd looking blacks and those bedridden women and almost at the dark Spaniard himself, the central hobGoblin of all
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And among the Malay Pirates it was no unusual thing to lure ships after them into their treacherous Harbors or entice boarders from a declared Enemy At Sea by the spectacle of thinly manned or vacant decks beneath which prowled 100 spears with yellow arms ready to upthrust them

And though it would involve no small embarrassment to himself yet he would spare three of his best seamen for temporary deck officers... so that without delay, the ship might proceed to her destined port (Lima)

What the San Dominick wanted was what the emigrant ship has: stern Superior officers. But on these decks, not so much as a fourth mate was to be seen
Buuuurn

BENITO CERENO:

His reserve might in some degree have proceeded from design. if so then here was evinced the unhealthy climax of that icy though conscientious policy more or less adopted by all commanders of large ships which obliterates like the manifestation of sway with every trace of Sociality transforming the man into a block or a Canon

So the blind slave obeyed its blinder Lord but, in obedience, slew him. So, the Creator was killed by the creature. So the Bell was too heavy for the tower, so the bell's main weakness was where the man's blood had flawed it. And so pride went before the fall...

Selfish ambition or the love of rule for its own sake far from being a peculiar infirmity of noble minds is shared by beings that have no mind at all. No creatures are so selfishly tyrannical as some brutes