…Ralph that that's actually a kind of amnesia? It's not that they're illiterate. Illiterate is when you don't know the difference between Melville and Hawthorne. Amnesia is when you don't know whether the thirty years war came before or after the war of the…

…really cognize notions like the future, the past, where I've been, what I want? I mean, you know, it's in Moby Dick. Melville says, if you would strike, strike through the mask, everything is a mask. And just behind that mask lurks. Well, what? That's…

…those futures in science fiction are simply, in a sense, models modeling for what works and what doesn't. I think. You know, Melville said reality outruns apprehension. I'm not sure he meant what I think he means, but certainly in the 20th century reality…

…And that's the way I've always gotten at it. I figure that's the way the really smart money gets at it. The. The Melville, the Joyce. These voices that you find are somehow. Channeling closer to that, mate. From a position closer to that matrix. Yeah,…

…And yet you rarely hear it enclosed by the. By our people, and yet it's where. Our woods go deepest. And Thoreau, Anderson, Melville, Hawthorne, I mean, oh, my God, these are the people who put together the 19th century american market. So that's just. I…

…really cognize notions like the future, the past, where I've been, what I want? I mean, you know, it's in Moby Dick. Melville says, if you would strike, strike through the mask, everything is a mask. And just behind that mask lurks. Well, what? That's…

…about a quest and it's about an unrelenting devotion to a certain kind of truth. And it's a tremendous allegory. I mean, Melville was no fool. And he was perfectly aware of the osirian religion that James Fraser was sketching out and of the comparative…

…underworld trying to reconstruct Osiris. And in this chapter, the quarter deck, the philosophy of american transcendentalism, which is what Melville was operating under and which we know too little of. I often think how much deeper and richer american…

…richer american environmentalism would be if people would read their Emerson. I mean, Emerson is the american blake in a sense, and Melville comes out of that. But there is a moment in which the first mate. I'm sorry, yes, the first mate, Starbuck. Ahab…