Longing for the soothing sound of waves and the salty sea breeze? Be whisked away into the world of literature, navigating the depth and breadth of Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick. So, snuggle up in your blankets and have sweet dreams.
The music in this episode is Token by Franz Gordon
BetterHelp Visit our sponsor at BetterHelp.com/dreamful for 10% off your first month.
HelloFresh Use code DREAMFULFREE for free breakfast for life!
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Longing for the soothing sound of waves and the salty sea breeze? Be whisked away into the world of literature, navigating the depth and breadth of Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick. So, snuggle up in your blankets and have sweet dreams.
The music in this episode is Token by Franz Gordon
BetterHelp Visit our sponsor at BetterHelp.com/dreamful for 10% off your first month.
HelloFresh Use code DREAMFULFREE for free breakfast for life!
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Welcome to Dreamful Podcast, bedtime stories for a slumber. I missed a couple episodes recently because I was having audio issues. Thanks to our supporters, I was able to buy a new microphone and hopefully this fixes it. So thank you to everyone who supports the show. You make this possible. And now I need to thank our newest supporters Kimberly Powell, mei Shawnee Jobare and Hina M. Thank you all so much and I hope you have the sweetest of dreams. If you'd like to support the show and gain access to subscriber-only episodes while receiving a shout out, visit DreamfulStoriescom and, on the support page, find a link to become a BuzzFraud supporter or subscribe via Supercast.
Jordan:
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Jordan:
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Jordan:
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Jordan:
In this episode, I will be reading from the famous first chapter of the Herman Melville classic Moby Dick. The writing of this novel is meandering and poetic and is really perfect for bedtime. So snuggle up in your blankets and have sweet dreams. Call me Ishmael. Some years ago never mind how long precisely Having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me ashore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before cough and warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet, and especially whenever my high post gets such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's heads off, then I counted high time to get to see as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish, kato throws himself upon a sword I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it. Almost all men in their degree sometime or other, shareish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean.
Jordan:
With me there now is your insular city of the Manhattanos, belted round by wars as Indian Isles by Kroll Reeves. Commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take your wayward. This extreme downtown is the battery, but that noble mull is washed by waves and cooled by breezes which, a few hours previous, right of sight of land Look at the crowds of water gazers there Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon.
Jordan:
Go from Krollier's Hook to Cointy's Slip, and from Lent's by Wight Hall Northward. What do you see? Hosted like silent sentinels, all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries, some leaning against the spiles, some seated upon the pure heads, some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China, some high loft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaword peep. But these are all lansmen of weekdays, pent up in lath and plaster, tied to counters, nailed to benches, clenched to desks. How, then, is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they hear? But look, here come boar crowds pacing straight for the water and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange, nothing will content them, but the extremist limit of a land Loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No, they must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand, miles of them, leagues In the landers. All they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues, north, east, south and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles, of the compasses, of all those ships attract them thither? Once more, say you are in the country, in some high land of lakes, like almost any path you please intend to one. It carries you down in a dale and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries and that man on his legs set his feet a-going and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be a thirst in the great American desert? Try this experiment if your caravan happened to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.
Jordan:
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all, the valley of the Sego. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit in a crucifix were thin. And here sleeps his meadow and there sleep his cattle. And up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke Deep into distant woodlands, winds a-mazy way reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hillside blue. But though the picture lies thus entranced, and though this pine tree shakes down at size like leaves upon the shepherd's head, yet all were vain unless the shepherd's eyes were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the prairies in June when, for scores, on scores of miles, you wade knee-deep among tiger lilies.
Jordan:
What is the one charm? Wanting Water. There is not a drop of water there, we're an agra, but a cataract of sand. Would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invests money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust, healthy boy with a robust, healthy soul in him, as sometime or another, crazy to go to sea? Why, upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration and 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 own brother of Jov? Surely all this is not without meaning and is 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 ingrassmable phantom of life, and this is the key to it all.
Jordan:
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes and begin to be over-conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger, for to go as a passenger, you must sneeze, have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get seasick, grow qualsome, don't sleep of nights, do not enjoy themselves much. As a general thing, no, I never go as a passenger. Nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore or a Captain or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them.
Jordan:
For my part, I abominate all honourable, respectable toils, trials and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself without taking care of ships, bogs, brags, schooners and whatnot. And as for going as Cook, though, I confess there is considerable glory in that, a Cook being a sort of officer on shipboard. Yet somehow I never fancied boiling fowls, though once broiled, judiciously buttered and judgematically salted and peppered. There is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians, upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge big houses, the pyramids.
Jordan:
No, when I go to sea I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast plumbed down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast head. True, they rather order me about some and make me jump from spar to spar like a grass hopper in a May meadow. And at first this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one sense of honour, particularly if you come out of an old, established family in the land, the van Rensselaer's or Randolph's or Hardik Nuth's. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tarpot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.
Jordan:
What of it if some old hunks of a sea captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks. What does that indignity amount to? Wait, I mean in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the Archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me Because I promptly and respectfully obey that? Old hunks, in that particular instance, who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well then, however the old sea captains may order me about, however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is alright that everybody else, in one way or other, served in much the same way, either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is. And so the universal thump is passed around, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder blades and be content Again.
Jordan:
I always go to sea as a sailor because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay, and to. There is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable inflection that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us, but being paid, what? We'll compare with it, the urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills and that on no account can a moneyed man enter heaven. Ah, how cheerfully we can sign ourselves to perdition.
Jordan:
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the four-castle deck. For, as in this world, headwinds are far more prevalent than winds from Aston. What is if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim? So, for the most part of the Commodore on the quarter deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the four-castle. He thinks he breathes at first, but not so. In much the same way do the commonality lead their leaders in many other things At the same time. Let the leaders little suspect it.
Jordan:
But wherefore it was that, after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a wailing voyage. This, the invisible police officer of the faiths, who has the constant surveillance of me, is secretly dogs me and influences me in some uncountable way. He can better answer than anyone else, and doubtless my going on this wailing voyage formed part of the grand program of providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this Grand, contested election for the presidency of the United States, wailing voyage by one-ish male, bloody battle in Afghanistan.
Jordan:
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the FACE, put me down for the shabby part of a wailing voyage, when others were sat down for magnificent parts in high tragedies and short, naisy parts in gentile comedies and jolly parts in farces. Though I cannot tell why this was exactly, yet, now that I recall the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which, being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did. Besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased free will and discriminating judgement, chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a potentious and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild in distant seas where he rolled his island bulk, the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale, these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped assway me to my wish.
Jordan:
With other men perhaps such things would not have been inducements. But as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail for bed and seas and land on barbless coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror and could still be social with it, would they let me, since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates at the places one lodges in. By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome. The great floodgates of the wonderworld swung open and in the wild conceits asswayed me to my purpose. Two and two there floated into my inmost soul in less processions of the whale Mid, most of them all, one grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air.
Jordan:
The most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all.
Jordan:
One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air, the most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all. One grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. The most of them all, one grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. Thank you for watching you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you.
