il reading Emerson's Nature.While I identified with Emerson's ideas, I didn't find them completely satisfying. There was no room in his philosophy for a true concept of Evil. But in order to exist, Good must have a force to actively oppose, or else all definitions fail. Reading Melville brought a balance to Emerson's ideas without denying them.In a few instances Melville supports the idea of the world as a single whole. In his story "I and My Chimney," he decries the practice of placing chimneys on the outside walls of a house, for then the occupants find themselves "fairly sitting back to back. Is this well? Be it put to any man who has a proper fraternal feeling. Has it not a sort of sulky appearance?" (328) Melville would rather arrange the chimney in the center, so that "when, in their various chambers, my family and guests are warming themselves. . . all their faces mutually look toward each other, yea, all their feet point to one centre;" (334) His version of the karmic wheel is presented early in Moby Dick:"Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me abouthowever they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or another served in the same wayeither in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulderblades, and be content." (15)But beyond the idea of the "universal thump," Moby Dick more often rebukes Emerson's ideas than encourages them.Melville blatantly refutes the utility of the "transparent eyeball" in everyday life. He draws a picture of a young sailor on top-watch "lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless sou...
