The Blanket — Moby-Dick

Ishmael pauses the butchery to quarrel with whalemen and naturalists about a stubborn question: where is the whale's skin, and what counts as it? He will not surrender his answer, though he admits it remains opinion. The blubber you have already seen stripped is firm, close-grained, elastic, eight to fifteen inches thick, and because no other dense envelope can be lifted from the body, he is willing to call that coat the true hide while the infinitely thin isinglass film above it becomes skin of the skin, satin-soft until dried, useful to him as transparent markers in his whale-books when he fancied he read the species through its own spectacles.

Scale follows definition: one large sperm whale's blubber may yield a hundred barrels of oil, ten tons from three quarters of the outer layer alone, which makes the living mass feel like a continent wrapped in fat. On the swimming animal, fine crossed lines show through that film like Italian engraving, sometimes doubling into hieroglyphics Ishmael compares to pyramid walls or Mississippi palisades he cannot decipher; full-grown bulls carry random scars on the flanks, likely the signatures of other whales' hostility.

Hence the happy sea-term blanket-piece: the whale wears blubber as poncho and counterpane, warm-blooded lungs and blood needing that insulation in Arctic seas where fallen sailors freeze upright in ice yet polar whales run hotter than a Borneo summer. Ishmael exhorts man to admire the creature's interior spaciousness and keep a self-regulated temperature amid equator and pole, like St. Peter's dome or the whale itself, then shrugs that few buildings or souls are built to the lesson.