The sea itself is godly--a source of ideas--the inuitive freedom of man himself. If you've ever studied Plato's sequence of reality, you'll understand the implications. (There is a supreme being; this is the ultimate reality. It exists without the existence of anything else. It is from this being that all ideas come forth. This is the second reality. Each of us is an idea from the supreme being. The third reality is a physical body for the idea. The fourth is participation in the idea, i.e. sitting in the idea "chair".) Melville used the ocean to represent the supreme being/existence that each person strives to rejoin. But there is an unfamiliarity with this discovery that makes the sea dangerous and frightening, just as divine truth is frightening.
             --I'm using the Bantam Classic edition of the book. All the page numbers I give you are from my edition.--
             "If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me." (p. 11)
             "But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." (p. 13)
             "Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb." (p. 18)--Melville debases the land as much as he reveres the ocean, furthering its divinity.
             "Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward wordly ties and connexions [sic]?" (p. 45)--This implies that isolation upon the sea is a spiritual awakening and experience.
             Read "The Lee Shore" (Ch. 23)--it too describes the mortality and worldliness of the port, as opposed to the immortality of the ocean.
             "The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port iis safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all
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