LITERARY ADDENDUMS 9/27

The following were read on the 9/27 emission de Thalassique:

A selection from Moby Dick by Herman Melville:
"Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons...."

"Lobsters and crabs once lived together in harmony, and even interbred, in a remote crustacean colony off the coast of Labrador. Then, a horrible plague of displaced orca whales beset their waters, blocking out the sun with their ominous, circling presence. The crustaceans began to quarrel over food and mates, which led to a mass genocide of the Labrador crabs by the lobster clans. Thus the species is no more, but as fate would have it, the Northwestern Atlantic region is the prime hunting grounds for lobster fishermen to this day."
A Thalassique original fable

"A whale once decided to live among mammals so he swam into the harbor and climbed ashore. He was received cordially and began to walk around on his tail fins. So well-received was he that the mayor invited him to walk in the annual parade. So down 5th Avenue he strut, waving graciously with his flipper at the smiling crowds. The Washington Square arch was barely in sight before a harpoon flew suddenly through the air, through his skin, through his blubber and muscle tissue and pierced his heart. The sound of his massive flesh against the ground was drowned by the roar of the crowd, who descended upon him. Weeks later his remains were returned to the Atlantic, and the dissembling island of Manhattan had new oils, perfumes and scented candles for their one bedroom apartments in the sky."
A Thalassique original fable