In Moby Dick, there is a character, Pip, who goes mad from
having been thrown overboard and abandoned to the sea in the heat
of a whale-chase. Melville describes Pip as having been transported
into another world, from which he can never return, like the enlightened
who leave Plato's cave:
By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but
from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot;
such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his
finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned
entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths,
where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and
fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed
his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile
eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral
insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal
orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke
it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity
is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes
at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd
and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent
as his God. (Moby Dick, chap. 93. New York: Signet, 1961:
396-7.)
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