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SEAt thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter was no duplicate

Kotkin seems kinda into this Stalin guy….

“As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, […] knowing not at what moment it may be locked in and crushed.”

Every time they actually kill a whale I want to cry and throw up. LEAVE THEM ALONE, THESE WHALES ARE READING SPINOZA

“Human or animal, the mystical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to their decrees. It signifies - 'God: done this day by my hand.'”

Funny as hell. Every four pages of chapter 1 there’s the literary equivalent of a needle drop.

(Paraphrase) “A young theorist was tearing his way through the scene. Named Vladimir Ulyanov. Maybe you know his pseudonym 😏”

And I point and clap everytime on queue.

“In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often discover images of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf of green surges.”