Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet Death Quotes

Our first encounter with death in this poem is this rather graphic description of the men wanting to see whale blood spurt up after (we assume) hitting the creature with a harpoon. And when the poem suggests that the men want to see this "to prove that they exist" it tells us pretty quickly that this whole life and death business can be kind of complicated. The two seem tangled up in each other, where the death of one thing invigorates the life of others. Or perhaps it's a matter of having death right in front of you, and the way that makes you aware of being alive.

Time flies. And why does it matter if you're rushing through life? Well, at some point you run out of it. If you had to choose between rushing through sixty years and not rushing, which would you choose? Probably not rushing, right? The way our speaker phrases it, he makes the hubbub pretty unappealing. It sounds like we miss out on a lot.

To make things even worse, now our speaker suggests that we might go through our whole lives without even finding a door: a way out, a way to another kind of life.