174 years ago, Herman Melville wrote the following remarkable sentence in his study in Pittsfield, MA:
Melville’s writing desk at Arrowhead, his farm outside Pittsfield, Massachusetts
“That for six thousand years — and no one knows how many millions of ages before- the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mystifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings –that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850), it should still remain a problem , whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor – this is surely a noteworthy thing.”
It would become the opening of Chapter 84, “The Fountain,” in Moby-Dick.