Author Archives: Aurora Copp

The Pitiful Port: Melville’s Meditation on Safety and Freedom

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In Chapter 23, “The Lee Shore,” Ishmael pauses to reflect on the paradox of safety and danger, using the image of a ship struggling against the wind: “The port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, and all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale……the one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through.” (Melville 116) This passage captures Melville’s fascination with the tension between the comfort of home and the perilous freedom of the open sea. On the surface, Ishmael seems to pity the ship for having to turn away from warmth and companionship, but beneath that pity, I think lies admiration. Admiration for the ship’s strong refusal to yield to safety. The repeated p sounds in “port,” “pitiful,” and “peril” emphasize the actual physical struggle of resistance, almost mimicking the ship’s heaving motion in the storm.

Melville’s language transforms the sea into a kind of moral testing ground. The ship, personified as a living being, “fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward.” (Melville 116) It’s as if the forces of nature, which normally symbolize comfort, normalcy, and even mortality, try to push her back to safety, but she seemingly continues to reject them. Her “refuge’s sake” lies not in reaching the shore, but in being able to escape it. The paradox here is striking: the ship seeks survival through danger, finds peace in motion, and calls her “bitterest foe” (the sea) her “only friend.” I believe that Melville’s phrasing suggests that true existence, or what Ishmael later calls “the highest truth,” can only be found in defiance of stillness and complacency.

What’s really remarkable about this moment is how it extends beyond the image of the ship. The passage feels like a challenge from Melville to his readers: to question the value of safety and to consider whether comfort dulls our vitality. The port, with its “warm blankets” and “friends,” represents the easy life of certainty and convention within society. The ship, meanwhile, embodies the actual human soul that refuses to settle, even when that refusal means pain or destruction. Melville’s use of the word “forlornly” conveys both sorrow and beauty, showing that this restless search is lonely but necessary to grow.

By turning a simple nautical scene into a full-blown philosophical allegory, Melville continues to show that he makes the sea a mirror for human experience. To live meaningfully, he suggests, is to sail “offshore,” to face the unknown with courage even when the winds seem to demand our retreat. The ship’s struggle against being blown homeward becomes a symbol of human endurance, a strong insistence that the comfort of safety can never compare to the freedom found in risk.

Where Comfort meets Discomfort: A Lesson in Opposites

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In Chapter 11, “Nightgown,” Ishmael muses: “Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable anymore.” (Melville 59) On the surface, this might be a casual observation about lying in bed, but the phrasing suggests something larger to me. Ishmael reveals that human experience is always relational. Comfort only matters when set against discomfort, just as light only has meaning when contrasted with darkness. This small moment becomes a window into Melville’s larger project: a novel that is less about fixed truths than about oppositions and tensions that define how we see the world.

For the book as a whole, I think that this insight resonates with the way Moby-Dick constantly frames the sea in these sorts of paradoxical terms. The ocean is vast yet suffocating, a space of both freedom and imprisonment, life and death. Just as Ishmael can only recognize comfort when he knows discomfort, he (and the reader) can only approach the meaning of the sea by holding together its contradictions. This shows that the novel is not about mastering or defining the ocean but about living within its shifting, relational nature. Ishmael’s comment in this chapter reads almost like a thesis statement for the entire narrative: nothing in this world exists as a single, stable entity. Everything takes shape through contrast, through relation, and through constant and fluid change.

This is why the moment with Queequeg is so significant. Ishmael’s newfound comfort sharing a bed with someone who once seemed strange or threatening underscores the novel’s interest in difference as a necessary condition for understanding. Without his earlier unease, Ishmael’s warmth with Queequeg would not stand out as meaningful. On a small scale, the line about comfort captures Ishmael’s transition from suspicion to intimacy. On a larger scale, it anticipates the way Melville’s novel demands that we hold opposites together, rather than separate and resolve them.

What makes this moment in Chapter 11 so powerful is how it condenses so many of the novel’s concerns into one simple observation. Ishmael isn’t just thinking about whether he feels warm and at ease in bed; he’s actually reflecting on how human life (and the ocean) can only be understood through contrast, tension, and change. The same principle applies to his friendship with Queequeg, to the sea that both unsettles and attracts him, and to the very shape and format of the novel itself, how it constantly weaves together opposites without trying to resolve them. By pausing on this line, I could see how Melville uses Ishmael’s everyday musings to point us to the larger philosophical questions that run beneath his story: how do we find meaning in a world defined not by its stability, but more so by its shifting contrasts?

Ishmael’s Restless Desire for the Remote

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At the very end of chapter 1, Ishmael admits, “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote” (Melville 8) which is a line that captures the spirit of his character and his larger ambitions of the novel. On the surface, Ishmael is explaining to his audience why he chooses to ship out on whaling voyages rather than just staying on land. But the phrasing, especially the word “tormented,” suggests that this desire for distance is not a casual curiosity but a relentless compulsion he must follow. His “itch” is not just wanderlust; it seems to be more of an existential drive that pushes him toward places, ideas, and experiences that lie beyond the familiar and outside of day-to-day life on land.

I think the key word in the sentence is “remote.” It refers to faraway places and geographies, such as the open sea, uncharted waters, and, of course, the dangerous world of whales, but I think it also signals Melville’s fascination with the abstract and the unknowable. Throughout Moby-Dick, Ishmael seeks knowledge that is just out of reach, whether that’s the biology of whales, the vastness of the ocean, or the inscrutability of Ahab. This passage, I believe, foreshadows the novel’s central tension: the pursuit of truths that can just never fully be grasped. Ishmael’s yearning mirrors humanity’s broader struggle with the limits of knowledge, especially in the face of nature’s just pure immensity.

At the same time, the quote also reflects the novel’s more restless narrative side. Melville’s digressions into philosophy, science, and history can be read more as Ishmael trying to scratch that same “everlasting itch.” The story refuses to stay straight and still, just as Ishmael cannot remain content just being on land. In this way, I believe that this line operates as a kind of mission statement for the novel itself: Moby-Dick is not only a whaling adventure but also a relentless reaching toward the remote, the distant, and the very unknowable.

Flow > Fields: Fluid Mindset of the Ocean

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When I read Steve Mentz’s Ocean, the line that stuck with me the most was: “We need flow to know Ocean.” (xvi) That short sentence on page 2, to me, captures the whole spirit of the blue humanities. Flow isn’t just about water moving; it’s about how we think, how we connect, and how we let go of the old land-based metaphors that have shaped cultures for so long.

Mentz challenges us to stop thinking of “fields,” which sound fixed, solid, and agricultural, and instead to think in “currents,” which are always in motion. As we should be. That shift feels important because the ocean itself is never still. Knowledge about the ocean, and probably knowledge in general, cannot stay locked into stable and fixed categories. It has to move, to bend, to circulate around us. Flow becomes not only a method but also a mindset.

What I found powerful about this idea is that it kind of resists the comfort of any type of certainty. Fields produce neat harvests on a sort of schedule, whereas flows of the ocean can carry you into the unknown. Flow makes history “messier, more confusing, and less familiar” (Mentz xvi), and that’s a good thing. It reminds me that learning, like the sea, isn’t about arriving at a final, solid truth but more about engaging with change, turbulence, and unpredictability. That’s when we learn.

Thinking this way also changes how I picture the climate crisis. Rising seas aren’t just a threat but also a reminder of interconnection. Flow shows us that humans aren’t separate from the ocean but are caught up in its movements. To “know Ocean” is to accept that we live in fluidity, that stability is more of an illusion, and that survival might mean learning to move with the currents instead of trying to anchor ourselves against them.

Ment’s simple phrase has made me rethink how I will approach literature, history, and even my own writing. Maybe instead of looking for the solid ground in every text, I should be searching for the flow, the connections, the shifts, the messy but vital movements that carry meaning forward.

Extra Credit – Steve Mentz Questions

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  1. What first drew you to the ocean as a central focus, and how did that interest evolve into what is now the “blue humanities”?
  2. How do you think studying the ocean through literature can help us think differently about challenges such as climate change today?
  3. Are there any particular books or authors that you think students should read if they want to get a better sense of how literature connects to the ocean?
  4. What advice would you give to students who want to bring environmental or ocean-focused perspectives into their own writing?
  5. When you first started writing about the blue humanities, did you expect it to grow into the field it is now?

Returning to Our Beginnings – John Gillis’s article “The Blue Humanities”

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In his 2013 essay The Blue Humanities, John Gillis writes about the seemingly profound connection between modern Western culture and the sea. He writes, “The sea lurks in the imaginations of millions, if not billions, of people who will never test its waters. It is forever in our dreams and nightmares…” This line resonates with me on many levels. It broadly captures a paradox that speaks deeply: as our direct interaction with the sea becomes rarer, fewer people make their living from it; it gains a symbolic presence instead. For me, this mirrors how we often romanticize or maybe mythologize experiences that we have grown disconnected from.

I think that Gillis’s observations throughout his article perfectly capture the transition many of us have made: the more removed we become from it, the more the sea inhabits our dreams, our art, and our sense of wonder and curiosity. There’s also a psychological aspect to this: the more we lose direct contact with something, the more room there is for our imagination to fill in. The sea becomes less a physical place and more a canvas for freedom, or danger, depth, and mystery. Gillis points out that for much of Western history, writers and artists hardly looked at the water at all. Instead, it was just the gap between coasts. A space one had to cross in order to reach land. Artists painted the boats or animals within the waters, but not the waters themselves. Only when people no longer had to live on or by the ocean daily did it seem to become visible in new ways.

Another passage that struck me comes when Gillis writes: “Pristine nature, now in short supply in industrialized heartlands, found refuge in the oceans, while the mystery once associated with terra incognita relocated to the deeps. Simultaneously, the sublime, previously associated with mountains and forests, came to be associated with wild water.” This moment helped me to see how cultural ideas about beauty, wilderness, and awe are not fixed; they actually do shift as our environments change. Once people had cut down forests, climbed mountains, and mapped the land, the mystery they so desperately wanted was no longer available, so it had to be sought elsewhere: the sea.

I find this meaningful because it speaks to the way humans seem to always be searching for spaces that remind us of our smallness. I have the same feeling when standing next to the ocean—that feeling of insignificance but amazement. Gillis’s point helped me see that the sea is not just a physical reality but also a vessel for what we may have lost on land. The need for untouched beauty and mystery seems to stay with the ocean.

Emerson and the Power of Self

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In one of the most striking moments of The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all.”

At first glance, this might sound overwhelming. How could any one person possibly “be an university of knowledges”? But I don’t think that Emerson is asking for perfection. I think he is making a much deeper point about where strength and truth really come from: within. When he says “help must come from the bosom alone,” he’s rejecting the idea that wisdom or growth can be handed to us by institutions, traditions, or even other people around us. Instead, Emerson seems to urge his reader to turn inward and to trust the resources that are planted inside of us.

That is classic Transcendentalism. The movement, after all, was built on the belief that the divine and the universal could be found within the individual. Emerson’s claim that “the world is nothing, man is all” doesn’t dismiss nature; I think that it reframes it. The world only takes on meaning when filtered through the mind of the individual. In other words, I don’t think that we receive truth passively, I think we create it by daring to think, question, and imagine.

The scholar, for Emerson, embodies this responsibility. He doesn’t seem to just memorize facts from the past or observe the present. Instead, he carries “all the ability of the time,” “all the contributions of the past,” and “all the hopes of the future” inside of himself. The true shcolar that Emerson writes about is active, daring, and above all, very self-reliant. I think this is a daunting yet empowering vision. Emerson is able to remind us that the potential for greatness isn’t just out there somewhere; it’s already inside each of us. Just waiting.

Intro – Aurora Copp

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Hi everyone! My name is Aurora Copp, and I am super excited to be taking this class. I have never taken a class where we only focus on one book, so I am really enthusiastic about learning as much as I can and really diving deeply into it. I am an English Single Subject Major, and I start the teaching credential program here at SDSU in the spring. I am really excited as well to get to know each of you in class! Thank you.