Notebook: The Line

Herman Melville:

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

Moby-Dick

Death and Doom

Herman Melville:

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 coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get 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 hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

Moby-Dick

Joseph Mitchell:

Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market. I usually arrive around five-thirty, and take a walk through the two huge open-fronted market sheds, the Old Market and the New Market, whose fronts rest on South Street and whose backs rest on piles in the East River. At that time, a little while before the trading begins, the stands in the sheds are heaped high and spilling over with forty to sixty kinds of finfish and shellfish from the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, and half a dozen foreign countries. The smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness always give me a feeling of well-being, and sometimes they elate me. I wander among the stands for an hour or so. Then I go into a cheerful market restaurant named Sloppy Louie's and eat a big, inexpensive, invigorating breakfast—a kippered herring and scrambled eggs, or a shad-roe omelet, or split sea scallops and bacon, or some other breakfast specialty of the place.

Up in the Old Hotel

(Images from the South Street Seaport archives.)

Melville at the Paper Mill

Winding along at the bottom of the gorge is a dangerously narrow wheel-road, occupying the bed of a former torrent. Following this road to its highest point, you stand as within a Dantean gateway. From the steepness of the walls here, their strangely ebon hue, and the sudden contraction of the gorge, this particular point is called the Black Notch. The ravine now expandingly descends into a great, purple, hopper-shaped hollow, far sunk among many Plutonian, shaggy-wooded mountains. By the country people this hollow is the called Devil's Dungeon. Sounds of torrents fall on all sides upon the ear. These rapid waters unite at last in one turbid, brick-colored stream, boiling through a flume among enormous boulders. They call this strange-colored torrent Blood River. Gaining a dark precipice it wheels suddenly to the west, and makes one maniac spring of sixty feet into the arms of a stunted wood of gray-haired pines, between which it thence eddies on its further way down to the invisible lowlands.

— Herman Melville, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" (emphasis added)

Herman Melville, we are told by biographer Hershel Parker, made an excursion to Carson's Old Red Mill in Dalton, Massachusetts in January 1851 in order to obtain "a sleigh-load of paper." One result was the writing of a curious narrative diptych, the second (and far more interesting) half of which — "The Tartarus of Maids" — is devoted to the narrator's fictional passage across a landscape of deep snow in order to procure supplies for his mail-order seed business from a paper factory near the aptly-named "Woedolor Mountain." It's an extraordinary (and extraordinarily odd) piece of bravura writing, marked by obsessive and blatantly allegorical use of color imagery and swirling with affinities not only to other Melville works and those of his contemporaries, but also to things as far afield as Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" and The Castle and Fritz Lang's silent-film masterpiece Metropolis.

Until around the beginning of the 19th century, paper was handcrafted in small workshops. The invention and perfection of the Fourdrinier Machine changed all that, and by Melville's time a paper mill had become, at least in his eyes, a monstrous inhuman industrial machine, "menially served" by a chilly host of pale, spectral virgins who, like their product, were spotless, blank sheets themselves:

At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.

The Carson's mill was acquired, even before Melville's visit, by the Crane & Co. stationery company, which still exists and which operates a museum in Dalton dedicated to the history of papermaking. Lothar Müller's White Magic: The Age of Paper, among its other rewards, includes a quite interesting discussion of the Melville story.