Today is a landmark day for me.  No it's not because I had a good day at work or because I'm finally about to see my family.  What I'm talking about is I just finished Moby Dick.   This is by far the most incredible book I've ever read.  While it's not my favorite book ever, it is in my Top 5, and it's breathtaking the whole way through.  Every other page is deeper than most books in their entirety.

There is one passage in particular that has got to be one of the most beautiful things I've ever read and it impacted me so much I decided to type it out.  I feel this passage encompasses the book as a whole.  It starts out great, continues to be incredible and then, although it gets slightly long-winded, the ending returns to form and is in fact better than everything written before it. 

All I ask is that you do take the time to read and appreciate this.  I know it may seem heavy but I promise you will like it if you give it a chance:   

    It was a clear steel-blue day.  The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in his sleep.
    Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed the mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.
    But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them.
    Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom.  And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion- most seen here at the equator- denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.
    Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven.
    Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure!  Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us!  Sweet childhood of air and sky!  how oblivious were ye of Ahab's close-coiled woe!  But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporing with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.
    Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity.  But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cantankerous thing in his soul.  That glad, hapy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel-forbidding-now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.  From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.