finally something to make moby dick worth reading!

So I decided to challenge myself by reading some old classics; I plan on reading The Odyssey, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Les miserables...but I have started with Moby Dick....You want a frustrating, seemingly pointless, politically incorrect, horror...read Moby Dick! At what is likely to be the two month mark I have but 70 pages to go! You cannot believe how glad I am to reach the end of this awful book which preaches the glory of whaling. It is truly grotesque to read about how they used to maim the gentle giants of the ocean for their oil.

However finally today I found some words of wisdom. On page 404 (yes its taken me a whopping two months to get that far!) I discovered this:

"There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed graduations, and at the last one pause;- through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolecence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbour, whence we unmoor no more?"

I really like this; it suggests that through life we go through various stages of faith;
When we were infants we did not believe anything...lets just say we arent capable of such intense thought.
When we were young children we believed whatever we were told without taking any deeper meaning from it. Life was easy then we asked why but didnt really consider the impact.
At adolecence many of us go through the rebelious, questioning stage; nothing is above being considered and rejected. All is doubted. This follows on to a less severe sceptisism but general belief, then a lack of belief followed by healthy wondering and deep consideration of beliefs; why we believe some things and not others.

I truly think that these are stages we go through, and often as is suggested in the book, regress to a previous stage. The events of life no doubt influence our attitudes to belief. When the world is kicking us in the teeth it is easy to be rebelious, disbelieving or sceptical. However when we are on top of the world it is easy to believe freely considering all our reasons for believing.
Just a little food for thought in any case!