Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Time must have a Stop by Aldous Huxley

...the Steppenwolf threw me a quick look, a look which criticized both the words and the speaker of them- an unforgettable and frightful look which spoke volumes! It was a look that did not
simply criticize the lecturer, annihilating the famous man with its delicate but crushing irony. That was the least of it. It was more sad than ironical; it was indeed utterly and hopelessly sad; it conveyed a quiet despair, born partly of conviction, partly of a mode of thought which had become habitual with him. This despair of his not only unmasked the conceited lecturer and
dismissed with its irony the matter at hand, the expectant attitude of the public, the somewhat presumptuous title under which the lecture was announced- no, the Steppenwolf's look pierced our whole epoch, its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated intellectuality. And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one who knew the full worth and meaning of man's life. It said:
"See what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!"
and at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a monkey's trick!



Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse

THE SPOUTER INN

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and specially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. -It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale. - It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. -Its a blasted heath. -It’s a Hyperborean winter scene. -It’s the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time.

But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once fot last all these fanies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

CHAPTER XXV

Yes, the whole universe was laughing with him. Laughing cosmically at the cosmic joke of its own self-frustration, guffawing from pole to pole at teh world-wide, age-old slapstick of disaster following on the heels of good intention. A counterpoint of innumerable hilarities--Voltairean voices, yelping in sharp shrill triumph over the bewildered agonies of stupidity and silliness; vast Rabelaisian voices, like bassoons and double basses, rejoicing in guts and excrement and copulation, rumbling delightedly at the spectacle of grossness, of inescapable animality.
...He thought again of the Triumphs of Education, the Triumphs of Science, Religion, Politics, and his merriment mounted to a kind of frenzy. Paroxysm after cosmic paroxysm. What pleasure, what power and glory! But suddenly he was aware that the laughter had passed beyond his control, had become a huge, autonomous hysteria, persisting against his will and in spite of the pain it was causing him, persisting with a life of its own that was alien to his life, with a purpose of its own that was entirely incompatible with his well-being.

Time must have a Stop
Aldous Huxley