________________________________________________
_ Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe.
But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part,
they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and
hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing
an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter
was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage.
Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those
belonging to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed,
practical extent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings
collateral to his own; the carpenter's pursuit being the ancient and
outbranching trunk of all those numerous handicrafts which more or
less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the
application to him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the
Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical
emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three or
four years' voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to
speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:--repairing stove boats,
sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting
bull's eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and
other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special
business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of
conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.
The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so
manifold, was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished
with several vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood.
At all times except when whales were alongside, this bench was
securely lashed athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.
A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its
hole: the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and
straightway files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage
strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of
right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter
makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist:
the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for
vermillion stars to be painted upon the blade of his every oar;
screwing each oar in his big vice of wood, the carpenter
symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to
wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears. Another
has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping one hand
upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow
unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round
the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his
jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth.
Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike
indifferent and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of
ivory; heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held
for capstans. But while now upon so wide a field thus variously
accomplished and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all
this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But
not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for
a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it
so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed
one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible
world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still
eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig
foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in
him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying
heartlessness;--yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old,
crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now
and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served
to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle
of Noah's ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long
wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no
moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward
clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript
abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe;
living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You
might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved
a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem
to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had
been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or
uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal
process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had
one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He
was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, MULTUM IN
PARVO, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior--though a little
swelled--of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of
various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls,
pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors
wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do
was to open that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for
tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were.
Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,
was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have
a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow
anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of
quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But
there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or
more. And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning
life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the
time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also
hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this
soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself
awake. _
Read next: CHAPTER 108 Ahab and the Carpenter.
Read previous: CHAPTER 106 Ahab's Leg.
Table of content of Moby Dick (or The Whale)
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
