Six Veins Of Reverie Comments

Few writers have such a precise aerodynamic feel for reverie that they would launch themselves on twenty-page extended flights without looking back. Herman Melville spins the airiest reveries and makes them part of the stories he tells. More than that, he makes each novel a testing ground for a particular variety, so you can read his oeuvre as a typology of reveries.

In REDBURN: HIS FIRST VOYAGE, the sailor-boy on a London dock has nothing to look forward to but thin gruel for supper. His pay had been docked because he dropped a hammer into the waves. Even so, just listening to the music of an old organ grinder conjures a panoply of wonders before his mind's eye. No hardship can defeat his power to fantasize romantically.
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