Though the windows were closed, and soon muffed, the bus was full of light. It was cruel light.
I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but of impossibilities, some gaunt, some bloated, some glaring with idiotic ferocity, some drowned beyond recovery in dreams; but all, in one way or another, distorted and faded.
One had a feeling that they might fall to pieces at any moment if the light grew much stronger. Then-there was a mirror on the end wall of the bus – I caught sight of my own.
MACBETH: Speak if you can. What are you? FIRST WITCH: All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis! SECOND WITCH All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor! THIRD WITCH All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter! BANQUO Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear things that do sound so fair? I’ th’ name of truth, are you fantastical, or that indeed which outwardly you show? My noble partner you greet with present grace and great prediction of noble having and of royal hope, that he seems rapt withal.
MACBETH Stay, you imperfect speakers. Tell me more. A prosperous gentleman, and to be king stands not within the prospect of belief. Witches vanish. BANQUO The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them. Whither are they vanished? MACBETH Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted, as breath into the wind. Would they had stayed! BANQUO Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner? MACBETH Your children shall be kings. BANQUO You shall be king.
It is the part of ourselves we do not normally admit to consciousness, let alone expression in action, that slips past the inner censor into our dreams and fantasies.
OUR REBEL EMOTIONSby Bernard Mobbs (1970)
This devilishly charming fellow is only a human nature characteristic. He is human nature itself; the corporeal personality honoring, respecting, reverencing, adoring and worshipping itself as king and as god in his own world.
THE WORD – A PHILOSOPHY (1958) by Edna Sarah Beardsley (re: devil)
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
Go, eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart, because it is now that God favors your works. Enjoy life with the wife you love, all the days of the vain life granted you under the sun. This is your lot in life for the toil of your labors under the sun.
Anything you can turn your hand to, do with what power you have; for there will be no work, no planning, no knowledge, no wisdom in Sheol where you are going.
