l, pervading mankind and nature." (140) While this a pleasurable reverie, the man on watch will see no whales, which, after all, is the purpose of his ascent. Thus Melville feels compelled to remark, "And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye shipowners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad. . . given to an unseasonable meditativeness." (139) This meditativeness makes the lad no friends among the rest of the crew, as "Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient 'interest' in the voyage. . . But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve?" (139) Well aware of the allure stemming contemplating nature overlong, he also admonishes "Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm!" (354) For while dreaming has its place, it can handicap when one has business to attend to in reality.Melville also denies that Emerson or any man can truly view the infinite. In order to illustrate this point, he first defines a whale as a symbol of the transition between the real and the spiritual (or as Emerson would put it, the Not Me and the Me, respectively). The underwater realm in Moby Dick is clearly identified with the supernatural, typified in the passage, "the mystic ocean. . . [seems to be] the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature." (140) A whale inhabits both the worlds above and below the surface of the water, since it has "lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded." (119) And as a symbol of the crossing between these planes, "the living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a lau...
