Moby-Dick is a whaling story. Undoubtedly the whaling story. The reader is taken, step-by-step and in minute detail, through each and every activity, through the society, through the geography, and through the economy of a real-life whaling ship.
La madre de Nastaya: “Lo más importante en la vida para nosotros es Nastaya y la familia. Verla crecer teniendo un buen corazón, siendo honesta… que Dios siempre la ayude.
“Cuando ocurrió el accidente de la Planta Nuclear de Chernobyl, fuimos a ver a mis padres, que viven cerca de Chernobyl. Mi padre y mi madre están muy enfermos. Yo atribuyo los dolores de cabeza y los problemas de riñón de Nastaya, a que nosotros íbamos allí de vacaciones. Ahora ella está bajo tratamiento. Espero que Dios la ayude a recuperar su salud. Nosotros confiamos en Dios”.
La familia completa reza fervientemente para que Nastaya se cure, confiando que El la va a curar.
Nastaya: “Estuve en el hospital, porque tuve problemas con los riñones y dolores de cabeza. Pero ahora todo esta bien.”
La madre de Nastaya
“Pusimos nuestra confianza en Dios”.
Dios esta contestando sus oraciones y esta curando a Nastaya. Su vida diaria es nuevamente como la vida de los otros niños en San Petersburgo. Ella juega con sus amigas, toma clases de baile; aunque esta un tanto atrasada en el colegio, debido a su larga ausencia. Pero es la vida espiritual lo que hace a Nastaya diferente.
Nastaya: “Para mi Dios es amor. Yo rezo para que todo el mundo tenga vida y esté saludable y no hayan guerras en el mundo”.
La madre de Nastaya: “No necesitamos nada más… salud y paz. Todo lo demás vendrá. Lo más importante es que haya tranquilidad y que los niños crezcan normalmente. La alegría más grande para una madre es que su hijo este saludable y contento”.
In recent years, many of the great holy places of Christendom have joined the World Wide Web by posting their own websites, making it possible for anyone in the world to “visit their grounds.” For example, world-famous shrines such as Lourdes, Fatima, Czestochowa and La Salette are now accessible via the Internet. Even lesser known sacred sites such as Our Lady of Giertzwald in Poland and St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Ireland can be found on the Internet. Of course, your pilgrimage doesn’t have to be limited to just shrines and sanctuaries either, as many renowned monasteries have also joined the Internet.
What does each website have to offer? Many provide historical information of the holy place in question, as well as practical information such as address, directions, etc. Many also provide photos, thus allowing the viewer to experience a pilgrimage site up-close. And with some websites, such as that of Lourdes, you can actually send your prayer petitions to the shrine itself.
However, with all this great news, there is one minor drawback — it’s often difficult to find these websites on the Internet. For this reason, I have assembled a listing of prime websites for many of the popular shrines and monasteries in Europe, with a corresponding paragraph explaining the significance of each sanctuary.
Whether you visit these websites to simply learn more about a particular holy place, or to obtain information for a future a trip, you’re sure to find that “traveling on pilgrimage via the Internet” can be a fascinating activity. Church-approved Marian apparition sites, Eucharistic Miracles, incorrupt saints and world-renowned churches are all just a few clicks away. So without further adieu, grab your cyber-passport and prepare to embark on a wonderful and hopefully inspirational techno-pilgrimage.
CZECH REPUBLIC
http://www.karmel.at/prag-jesu
Every year several million pilgrims visit the world-famous church of Our Lady Victorious in the Czech Republic, which features the renowned statue of the Holy Infant Child of Prague. The statue is one of the most recognizable religious images in the Catholic faith, and object of one of our most famous and beloved devotions.
The All-Knowing Ishmael
One is confronted, in turning to the wonderful characters in Moby-Dick, with the same issue — where to begin? Let me just introduce the two principal characters briefly. Ishmael (he of that most famous of self-identifications, “Call me Ishmael”) is presented as a sometimes morose, scholarly type seeking to shake off something — something that these days might be more routinely exorcised by the administration of any number of prescription medications — by means of an extended visit to what he refers to, in a model of understatement, as “the watery part of the world.” He is doggedly seeking, questing, to “expand his horizons,” and he succeeds, as it turns out, beyond any measure of what he could reasonably have hoped for.
In fact, Ishmael’s gradual “self-expansion” allows him, as the narrative voice of the novel, to recede at various points from its direct action in order to assume a perspective of quasi-omniscience. (No! Don’t go away! I’ll stop speaking like that. It’s just something about this book.) How else can we explain the fact that Ishmael comes to report, in detail, upon things he cannot possibly have observed? “He [Ahab] tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made.” Later in the novel Ahab is described, but while alone in his cabin. Is that you, gentle Ishmael? How can it be that you are witnessing these things?
Products
Book — Keeping Your Kids Catholic
Audio Tapes — Like Father, Like Son
Book — My Baby Book
Other Articles by Lycidas
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll
Discussion Forum
What books do you consider the greatest of all time?
But the exposure to the world of the whaling man is set against the more famous, and thrilling, backdrop of the Pursuit, the Sighting, the Chase, and, ultimately, the Battle. Need I remind you how it ends?
The “Whale.” Say it slowly – out loud – in a firm, but low voice. The “Wal” (Dutch). And again. The “Hwal” (Swedish). Lower still, and firmer. Draw it out. The “Hval” (Danish).
““There she blows,” was sung out from the masthead.
“Where away?” demanded the captain.
“Three points off the lee bow, sir.”
“Raise up your wheel. Steady!”
“Steady, sir.”
“Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?”
“Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she breaches!”
“Sing out! Sing out every time!”
“Ay ay, sir! There she blows! There – there – thar she blows – bowes – bo – o – o – s!”
“How far off?”
“Two miles and a half.”
“Thunder and lightning! So near! Call all hands!”
Is your heart racing now? Are you like me? Then beware. You, like me, can probably all too easily fall prey to the incantatory magic of old-time whaling talk, or the rough heartiness of a rig-a-dig tune or sea-chantey. A moment’s exposure makes your faithful correspondent burn to venture forth on a cold evening and smoke a short-stemmed pipe — perhaps quaff an ale at a place with a name like the Spouter Inn, and discourse about harpoons, or skrimshander. (Skrimshander? Why it’s etching, man, on whale-tooth and whalebone! Sing me a sea-chantey, boy! Sing out now!) A particularly persuasive person could probably even convince me that I used to, in fact, be a whaling man. Or that I come from New Bedford, or Nantucket.
A Whaling Story
I blame Moby-Dick (in which the “sighting” passage, above, is quoted) for all that. It has seeped into my skin, and my bones. First published in England in October 1851 as The Whale, with the complete American edition following in November 1851 as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, it would come to be regarded as Herman Melville’s masterpiece, and a masterpiece, moreover, of world fiction. But it didn’t start out with that reputation. At the time, the Boston Post reputedly ridiculed it as, “[n]ot worth the money asked for it, either as a literary work or as a mass of printed paper.” Melville, who had already achieved some measure of literary celebrity by the time of Moby-Dick’s publication, was only thirty-one years old when he began work on the novel which would earn him that delightful, if none too accurate, review. (Thirty-one. And Moby-Dick!)
Ahh, where to begin? I suppose I only have room in this space for story and a little character, so let’s start with the story itself, as if it really happened. Moby-Dick is a whaling story. Undoubtedly the whaling story. The reader is taken, step-by-step and in minute detail, through each and every activity, through the society, through the geography, and through the economy of a real-life whaling ship (in the novel represented by the fictitious whaling ship, The Pequod). But the exposure to the world of the whaling man is set against the more famous, and thrilling, backdrop of the Pursuit (although, when you grapple with the actual text, is it clear who is pursuing whom?), the Sighting, the Chase, and, ultimately, the Battle. Need I remind you how it ends?
The Dread, Unholy Figure
Ahab, on the other end of the spectrum, is a self-contained terror and a wonder. He is also on a quest, but not a quest for self-discovery; rather, a quest of bitter and endless, even mindless (or maybe, better still, mindful — sinfully mindful) revenge upon the Great White Whale, who, we are told (ambiguously) has “dismasted” him.
Ahab’s is a biblical name, from I Kings 16-22. The biblical Ahab was an idolater who “did evil in the sight of the Lord.” His wife was Jezebel. He “did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him.” Unlike Ishmael and his gradual “diffusion” into the citizenry of the Pequod/world (“I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs….”), Ahab is a dread, unchanging and unholy figure. “He [Moby-Dick] tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” Ahab’s brazen monomania chills the blood. And yet he’s never one-dimensional. We are even told, indirectly, that he has a young wife at home, and a child.
As for the remainder of the characters, their names, familiar in our mouths as household words (to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Henry V), live on: Starbuck (who accuses Ahab of the blasphemy); Queequeg; Stubb; Flask; Daggoo; the Captain of The Rachel (for whose son, lost at sea, Ahab refuses to search, pleading time lost in pursuit of the Hval); Fedallah (the mysterious, almost ghostly, “tiger yellow” accomplice to Ahab’s menace); and so many more – and we mustn’t forget little Pip! They get inside your head, and they cling there, like barnacles to a nineteenth century schooner.
You’ll just have to see for yourself. Pick up the book, or take it out of the library. Your faithful correspondent trusts you’ll eventually get around to it, and he leaves you with this advice until you do: “[B]e cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, / While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!”
