“Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and make him the own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.(p.5)

This passage in the first chapter drew me in with the sheer passion for the water that Ishmael has. Ishamel argues that water is the gravitational pull of life. But there is also a mysticism and fascination of water, of being in it, even to the point of drowning as Narcissus did. His ponderings and emphatic assertions of the pull of water, remind me of conversations we had concerning the blue humanities, and its limitlessness in the human connection with all bodies of water. 

In this chapter, as Ishmael prepares to tell his tale, he argues that his pull to the ocean is not a unique one but one felt throughout all humanity. That much is true for my own experiences. As someone who lives in a coastal city, I can’t bear the thought of being so far away from the open ocean; it makes me feel trapped. And indeed, the few times I’ve visited deserts and forests, I’ve searched for water, whether it was a small creek formed by the melting of ice somewhere higher in the mountains, or the spring blooms reliant on rain and groundwater. 

I enjoy the way Ishmael seems to be speaking and arguing to the reader, reinforcing his assertions through the citing of myths, and the analysis of painted landscapes being nothing without the glorious river running through it: “yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him(p.4).” I loved the comical sarcasm in his voice as he questions, “Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?(p.5)” Through his view of the world, it could be seen as a universal truth that the human soul is on a never-ending quest to return constantly to the water. Though humans are indeed creatures of the land, our survival is tied to the water, so much so that it not only quenches our thirst but fills up and renews our souls (or at least this is the quest Ishmael has set upon).