The Chapel — Moby-Dick

Sleet replaces the morning sun, and Ishmael fights his way to the Whaleman's Chapel because moody fishermen bound for the Pacific seldom skip this Sunday errand. Inside, sailors, wives, and widows sit scattered like silent islands, each grief insular and incommunicable while storm shrieks rattle the walls. The chaplain has not come; the room reads instead. Black-bordered marble tablets masoned beside the pulpit name the ledger of the trade: John Talbot lost overboard at eighteen off Patagonia; six men of the Eliza towed out of sight by a whale; Captain Hardy killed in his bow by a sperm whale off Japan. Sister, shipmates, widow paid for the stones; no grass covers the ashes beneath.

Near the door sits Queequeg, the only face that turns when Ishmael enters. He cannot read the frigid inscriptions, so he watches living people with wondering curiosity while literate mourners bleed afresh over bitter blanks that mark placeless deaths. Ishmael thinks of land burials where you can say here lies my beloved, then spirals through the old puzzles of the dead until, on the eve of his own Nantucket voyage, he reads the tablets as prophecy: yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine.

Then, improbably, he grows merry again. Whaling bundles a man speechlessly into eternity, yet methinks the body is but lees and the shadow on earth not the true substance; let Jove stave his soul if he can, for a stove boat may make him immortal by brevet. Three cheers for Nantucket anyway, and the empty pulpit still waits above the dead while someone drenched from the storm prepares to climb it. What will a harpooneer's sermon sound like after a room has already counted the cost in stone?