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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 11h

"It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel..." Moby-Dick, Ch. 15

• Quote from: "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale" c. 1851.
• Source: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983, New York, N.Y. Fourteenth Printing, The Library of America.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

#TodaysPoem "Tell brave deeds of war." Then they recounted tales, — "There were stern stands And bitter runs for glory." Ah, I think there were braver deeds. - Stephen Crane, c. 1895

• American author Stephen Crane in 1899 [age ~27].
Source: Britannica Online Encyclopedia (Bettmann / Corbis). Public domain.
• Stephen Crane
Born: November 1, 1871, Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
Died: June 5, 1900 (aged 28), Baden, Germany (died of tuberculosis).

Cover of 1st edition of "The Black Riders and Other Lines" by Stephen Crane.
Publisher: Copeland and Day, 1895, Boston.
Source: Wordpress.com Principles of Literary Study (and Wikipedia).

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman." Moby-Dick, Ch. 14

• In this quote, Melville is referring to "...Nantucketers, these sea hermits...For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires..."
• From: Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale" c. 1851.
• Source: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983, New York, N.Y. Fourteenth Printing, The Library of America.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

#haiku -ish Shadows grow tall Time slows, thoughts turn inward The long autumn nights

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 "Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melo-dramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask?"

• Cover photo source: Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman. Democratic Vistas, 1871: The Original Edition in Facsimile, University of lowa Press, 2009. Source: Project MUSE, Johns Hopkins University.
• Text source: WALT WHITMAN: POETRY & PROSE
Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1982.
Published in the United States by Library of America.
Twenty-second printing, 1982.
• Reference: The Whitman Archive

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 Thy body permanent, The body lurking there within thy body, The only purport of the form thou art, the real I myself, An image, an eidólon. - Walt Whitman, Eidólons (1876)

"Eidólons" was first published in the New York Tribune in 1876, and again in the 1876 volume of Whitman's Two Rivulets; later collected in Leaves of Grass. The original manuscript is held in The Walt Whitman Collection, Boston Public Library.
• Source: The Whitman Archive

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records." Moby-Dick, Ch. 13

Herman Melville, circa 1860. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

#MelvilleMonday "It is not down in any map; true places never are." Moby-Dick, Ch. 12 Sunburst at Sea by Lovell Birge Harrison, 1913.

• Sunburst at Sea by Lovell Birge Harrison (1854-1929), pastel and graphite on paper, c. 1913-14. Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina. Public domain.
• Quote: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (c. 1851). From Chapter 12, Biographical: "Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are."
• Source: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983, New York, N.Y. Fourteenth Printing, The Library of America.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

#SundaySentence In short, he must substitute the deed for the word, the spirit for the letter. - Jack London, ca. 1899

Photo: Jack London, circa 1897, age twenty-one, as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. This was not long after his days as a hobo, which he recounted in another story - "The Road."
[Source: UC Berkeley, The Bancroft Library]

• This story draws on London's own experiences during the Klondike Gold Rush, specifically a winter spent weathering isolation in the Yukon. It was first published in Overland Monthly magazine, June 1899.
• Jack London (John Griffith London) was an American novelist, journalist and activist.
Born: 1876, San Francisco, California.
Died: 1916, Glen Ellen, California.
• Source: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1982, New York, N.Y. The Library of America. Fourteenth Printing.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

"...yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them." Moby-Dick, Ch. 11

• Quote: Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale" c. 1851.
• Source: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983, New York, N.Y. Fourteenth Printing, The Library of America.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"For the courtesies of ordinary life, he must substitute unselfishness, forbearance, and tolerance. Thus, and thus only, can he gain that pearl of great price,—true comradeship." - Jack London, In a Far Country (1899)

• The story draws on London's own experiences during the Klondike Gold Rush, specifically a winter spent weathering extreme isolation in the Yukon.
• Jack London (John Griffith London) was an American novelist, journalist and activist.
Born: 1876, San Francisco, California.
Died: 1916, Glen Ellen, California.
• Source: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1982, New York, N.Y. The Library of America. Fourteenth Printing.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

"Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part." Moby-Dick, Ch. 11

By "clayey part" Melville is apparently referring to the physical body, and the visible, three-dimensional world, in general (presumably man is made by the gods from dust, dirt, including clay, etc; that is, from the earth) – as opposed to the soul, or spiritual identity.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 And these I see, these sparkling eyes, These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives, Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships, Soon to sail out over the measureless seas, On the soul's voyage. - Walt Whitman, An Old Man's Thought of School

"Walt Whitman by Napoleon Sarony, July 1878"
Source: The Walt Whitman Archive.

• Walt Whitman's poem "An Old Man's Thought of School" was first published on November 3, 1874 in The New York Daily Graphic. The poem was later collected in Leaves of Grass under the section titled Autumn Rivulets, starting with the 1881-1882 edition.
• Whitman wrote "An Old Man's Thought of School" for the inauguration of the new Cooper Public School in Camden, New Jersey, where he recited it personally on October 31, 1874.
• Text source: WALT WHITMAN: POETRY & PROSE
Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1982.
Published in the United States by Library of America.
Twenty-second printing, 1982.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

#haiku A nation... Unmoored — awash in Corruption, brutality Lost is true north

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The man who turns his back upon the comforts of an elder civilization, to face the savage youth, the primordial simplicity of the North, may estimate success at an inverse ratio to the quantity and quality of his hopelessly fixed habits. - Jack London, In a Far Country (1899)

Photo: Jack London, circa 1897, age twenty-one, as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. This was just two years before "A Far Country" was published in Overland Monthly magazine.
[Source: UC Berkeley, The Bancroft Library]

• Jack London (John Griffith London) was a novelist, journalist and social activist.
Born: 1876, San Francisco, California.
Died: 1916, Glen Ellen, California.
• The story draws on London's own experiences during the Klondike Gold Rush, specifically a winter spent weathering extreme isolation in the Yukon.
• Source: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1982, New York, N.Y. Fourteenth Printing. The Library of America.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Though I am silent there is singing around me. - Wendell Berry (from "Woods") Photo from my wife's walk today:

Wendell Berry (poet, essayist, and farmer) died on August 31, 2026. His poem "Woods" was first published in 1979-80.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

#MelvilleMonday "I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy." Moby-Dick, Ch. 10

Artwork by Francis Day, based on the photograph of Herman Melville, circa 1860. From the article HERMAN MELVILLE'S SOFT WITHDRAWAL by John Updike, May 2, 1982, The New Yorker. Source: LIFE Picture Collection (Courtesy of the Library of Congress).

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

couplet ✨ The stifling air of low expectations – Graveyard of dreams and realizations

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils." Moby-Dick, Ch. 10 (referring to Queequeg)

• From Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale" c. 1851.
• Source: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983, New York, N.Y. Fourteenth Printing, The Library of America.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you, Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you. - Walt Whitman, c. 1860

Excerpt is from Walt Whitman's poem "To a Common Prostitute", Leaves of Grass collection (1860-61); often included in the Autumn Rivulets portion of LoG.

Photo: Walt Whitman by Mathew Brady, ca. 1865 - 1867.
Source: The Whitman Archive

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 No one could have more doubts of me than I have of myself: I'm not sure of anything except my intentions. - Walt Whitman Speaks (Ch. 13, Self-Reflection)

Source:
"Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America" as told to his friend and confidante Horace Traubel over the last several years (c. 1888-1892) of Whitman's life. Published by Library of America, 2019.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!" Moby-Dick, Ch. 9

The quote is spoken by Father Mapple at the Whaleman's Chapel, New Bedford, Massachusetts.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

#MelvilleMonday "Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self." Moby-Dick, Ch. 9

• Quote from: Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale" c. 1851.
• Source: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983, New York, N.Y. Fourteenth Printing, The Library of America.

The quote is spoken by Father Mapple at the Whaleman's Chapel, New Bedford, Massachusetts. The topic of his sermon is Jonah and the whale.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

#MelvilleMonday "In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers." Moby-Dick, Ch. 9 (Father Mapple's sermon)

Artwork by Francis Day. Photograph from The LIFE Picture Collection /
Getty.

Artwork by Francis Day, based on the photograph of Herman Melville, circa 1860. From the article HERMAN MELVILLE'S SOFT WITHDRAWAL by John Updike, May 2, 1982, The New Yorker. Source: LIFE Picture Collection (Courtesy of the Library of Congress).

Quote, spoken by Father Mapple:

"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. ..."

• Source: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983, New York, N.Y. Fourteenth Printing, The Library of America.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

#SundaySentence "What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave." - Herman Melville, c. 1851

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

🕊️ "Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then! Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance." Moby-Dick, Ch. 7

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

"There weekly arrive in this town [New Bedford] scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance." Moby-Dick, Ch. 6

Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983, New York, N.Y. Fourteenth Printing, The Library of America.

Artwork by Francis Day, based on the photograph of Herman Melville, circa 1860, from the article HERMAN MELVILLE'S SOFT WITHDRAWAL by John Updike, The New Yorker May 2, 1982. From the LIFE Picture Collection (Courtesy of the Library of Congress).

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 Hast never come to thee an hour, A sudden gleam divine, precipitating, bursting all these bubbles, fashions, wealth? These eager business aims—books, politics, art, amours, To utter nothingness? - Walt Whitman, from By the Roadside, Leaves of Grass, c. 1881

Poem: HAST NEVER COME TO THEE AN HOUR
LEAVES OF GRASS
Published by JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, BOSTON, 1881-82.
Source: Whitman Archive.

Walt Whitman by Bartlett F. Kenney, 1881
Source: Whitman Archive.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

#MelvilleMonday "Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas […] and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table […] A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whale-men!" Moby-Dick, Ch. 5

Source: Moby-Dick or The Whale. The Library of America. Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983, New York, N.Y. Fourteenth Printing,

Art by Francis Day. Photograph from The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty.
Source: New Yorker article HERMAN MELVILLE'S SOFT WITHDRAWAL, by John Updike, May 2, 1982.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

#MelvilleMonday & Labor Day⚓️ "These white-fingered gentry must be light-fingered too, they say to themselves, or they would not be after putting their hands into our tar." - Melville (Redburn) John Atkinson Grimshaw. Salthouse Dock, Liverpool. 1884.

Salthouse Dock, Liverpool, 1884
John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893)
Source: Liverpool Central Library

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach. Li-Young Lee, From Blossoms (excerpt) poets.org/poem/blossom...

poets.org

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 (+1) Will you seek afar off? Happiness not in another place, but this place . . . . not for another hour, but this hour - Walt Whitman, c. 1855

• Title page of the 1st edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 1855, which was self-published. It was printed and bound in Brooklyn, New York, with roughly 300 copies in the first run – with the printing, reportedly, overseen by Whitman himself.
• Notably, the author's name is omitted, but is seen only in the copyright notice ("Walter Whitman"); however, later on, as the poem's speaker in the book's central work "Song of Myself," he identifies himself as "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs..."
• Source: The Whitman Archive

• Frontispiece engraving of Walt Whitman [age 36] by Samuel Hollyer, based on a daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison, for the first edition of Leaves of Grass, 1855, which was self-published.
• Source: The Whitman Archive

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field. -Walt Whitman

• Quote: Walt Whitman, c. 1871
• Cover photo source: Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman. Democratic Vistas: The Original Edition in Facsimile. paper ed. University of lowa Press,
2009. Project MUSE, Johns Hopkins University.

• Text source: WALT WHITMAN: POETRY & PROSE
Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1982.
Published in the United States by Library of America.
Twenty-second printing, 1982.

Source:
Wrobel, Arthur. "Democratic Vistas [1871]. The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

How easily one can forget... The simple pleasures Of her elemental treasures

Photo from my room, showing clouds afloat above a canopy of trees.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Humpback whale sounds on this song were provided by Roger Payne and the New York Zoological Society. Payne received the recordings from Navy engineer Frank Watlington, who captured the humpback vocalizations while tracking submarine sounds off the Bermuda coast.🐋

npr.org

Recordings That Made Waves: The Songs That Saved The Whales

In the mid-1960s, a biologist discovered the beauty of humpback whale songs. But his recordings weren't just academic — they were woven into popular music, and they kicked off an entire movement.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

A lyric twist on this #MelvilleMonday 🇬🇱 Our ship is well rigged And she's ready to sail The crew they are anxious To follow the whale And the birds here sing sweetly In mountain and dale But there's no bird in Greenland To sing to the whale – George Scroggie, c. 1857 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 +

youtu.be

Farewell to Tarwathie

YouTube video by Judy Collins - Topic

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

For the first time in a long time, I ventured outdoors yesterday with my wife. The greenery, the breeze, the vast blue – how wonderful. How one forgets.

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CelticStoic(Dan) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @celticstoic.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

#SundaySentence "Banishment is a way of life for poets, so what's to be afraid of?" - Garrison Keillor, from the Introduction, c. 2005

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