Notes + Text - All About Love

A Bosom Friend

by Herman Melville, from Moby Dick

As I sat there in that now lonely room .… the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain… I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.  This soothing savage had redeemed it.  …. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him.  And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me.  I’ll find a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.  I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile.  At first he little noticed these advances’ but .… he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows.  I told him yes; whereat I though he looked pleased, perhaps a bit complimented.

….  Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff.  And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us…He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine; clasped me round the waist, and said that we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me if need should be.  In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted, but in this simple save those old rules would not apply .... Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.

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