the sea is all around

“I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.”

Where is the mind, Arendt asks, when it withdraws from the world of appearances? It is “Nowhere”: “Though known to us only in inseparable union with a body that is at home in the world of appearances by virtue of having arrived one day and knowing that one day it will depart, the invisible ego is, strictly speaking, Nowhere.” According to Arendt, to truly think, we have to step away from the world of appearance and retreat into ourselves. Once this retreat is effected, we can pull the idea for contemplation into our mind. We move into our mind and out of the body — and there, away from others, and, in a sense, away from ourselves, we can truly practise thinking.

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body—a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange ... This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree ... Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

“Reading parts of ‘Moby-Dick’ is like watching a fireworks in which Virgilian Roman candles, Old Testament sparklers, and Shakespearean bottle rockets pop off all at once, hissing and whistling; you get the feeling the stage manager is about to blow a finger off. If there’s a showiness to Melville’s pyrotechnics, his erudition was hard-won. But this was among the qualities of his ‘Moby-Dick’ that reviewers found bonkers: ‘The style is maniacal—mad as a March hare.’”