But what I am anxious to arrive at is it is one thing for instance to invent those rays Rontgen did or the telescope like Edison, though I believe it was before his time Galileo was the man, I mean, and the same applies to the laws, for example, of a farreaching natural phenomenon such as electricity but it’s a horse of quite another colour to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural God.
It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me.
Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems–aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.
Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?
And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist.
Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.
Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows.
A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.
Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.
The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit.
Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville
As you eliminate your body on the web, you recuperate it in your physical location.
Sometimes you have a body, sometimes you don’t.
If you don’t have a body, you’re not there.
If you have a body, you are so there that your relationship with the world is what I call proprioceptive. It’s tactile. It’s not visual as it was during the Renaissance.
In the Renaissance, what was your identity? It was the outer limit of skin, a head that processed information, a dumb universe shown as a spectacle.
Identity became a point of view.
Today, identity is a point of being. We add the new possibilities of mixed identities, collective identities, just-in-time identities, fabricated identities.
There’s great flexibility, but the core business of self remains, just extended all over the planet by electronic extensions.
pro·pri·o·cep·tive – relating to stimuli that are produced and perceived within an organism, especially those connected with the position and movement of the body.
Forward – If, in this annual, the staff of ’36 can help to cast a backward glance over many pleasant, carefree hours spent in M.H.S. and cause us to live again those happy days of youth, we have reached our goal.