Chapter 23 of Moby-Dick is entitled “The Lee Shore.”  It offers some philosophical commentary on the need for travel and direct experience.  Melville reflects on the restless, roaming nature of a sailor named Bulkington: 

I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.  The land seemed scorching to his feet. 

The land seemed scorching to his feet.  In other words, he could hardly remain in one place, lest his feet become charred.  His psyche walked on burning coals.  At all costs he had to get away, to get out.  To where?  Anywhere.  For this is what it means to be restless:  to crave exploration, new vistas, new sensory stimuli, and all that comes with these incarnate things.  Where others may have seen a safe port, Bulkington saw a prison; he could not help but seek “all the lashed sea’s landlessness again.”  Because in this watery vastness he could learn to live and feel again. 

Melville cries out that “all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.”  The shore, the safe port, which represents the comfortable, sedentary life, is servitude, while the sea represents for him a raw, saline-saturated independence of soul.  For him the shore is a breeding ground of moral corruption and intolerable iniquity.  On the shore, to borrow the words of Dante,

Envy and Arrogance and Avarice

Are the three sparks that have all hearts enkindled.

[Inferno VI.74-75]

The only way to escape the debilitating gravitational pull of these evils is to set out for the open ocean, again and again.  It is one of the primary laws of life, really. We may even call it a spiritual imperative. If you want to be free, you must get out: physically and then mentally. It sounds so simple as a stated principle. But in real life it is one of the most difficult feats to accomplish: because it involves breaking free of the shore, and plunging off into the unknown. And most men are unwilling to do this: because it involves a painful, agonizing rebirth of the consciousness. There is a memorable quotation in this same chapter.  Melville says that “deep memories yield no epitaphs.”  What does he mean by this?  He means that deep and real memories—deep and real experiences—do not lend themselves easily to encapsulization or neat summation.  We cannot package them up in wrapping paper and affix bow ties to them. 

Real memories burst the frail boundaries of the consciousness, and hover in a sort of netherworld of remembrance:  they signify different things to us at different periods of our lives; and even then their meanings are not entirely clear.  Has anyone ever really pinned down a memory, or bottled it in a jar of formaldehyde to ensure its chemical permanence, or pressed it, butterfly-like, between the pages of a heavy volume?  No.  Because this cannot be done.  The deepest experiences are inexpressible, for they shift and change with the mottled perspectives of sempiternal time.  Only the vast boundlessness of the sea can embrace experience, in all its changeable and irrepressible beauty and cruelty.

The problem with this program for personal salvation—this taking to the open ocean—is that it enbrines, so to speak, the very blood that pulses through our arteries.  Once the blood has felt this infusion of sea-salt, it is never quite the same again.  It cannot—it will not—tolerate the pious inanities of what was once called “polite society.”  The soul becomes reborn, a new creation:  something novel and entirely different.  It has been reconstituted with different stuff, different matter. For this kind of soul, the jibber-jabber of the chattering classes, their insipid ideas, their mealy-mouthed platitudes, their untouchable totems, become nothing more than the clinking and clattering of slave-chains.  In their presence, the reborn soul writes in agony. Some men were just born to writhe.  They cannot help it.  And maybe it is good that this is so.  But in the end we all find our own mechanisms of liberation, either in this life or, if we are truly favored by Fortune, through some divine instrument of futurity.

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Be sure to take a look at the new, annotated translation of Cicero’s On The Nature Of The Gods.