More Melville.

I love it when I see a nebulous concept that has been floating around in my head incisively tethered to the concrete. That's just one of the reasons why I found Moby Dick so immediate and absorbing. Who wouldn't want to keep reading after an opening like this?

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; hence, he now comes in person on this stage.