“It is almost indecent to see the whales in such detail. I wonder, guiltily, if I ought to avert my eyes for fear of finding them too sensual – just as I admit that sometimes whales have the capacity to revolt me with their serpentine animalness, and now I question why I invent so much of myself in them. Even now, I cannot reconcile myself to their corporeality. Then there are days when they seem all the more pristine for their appearance out of water, as if newborn. One afternoon, an unnamed yearling presented pure white patches on its upper flukes, its chin and over its eye, so sharply contrasted, one eyelid black, the other white. For a few seconds – it cannot have been longer, although it seemed so – its eye met mine. Far from the dumb insolence of a horse or a dog’s pleading fidelity, it fixed me with a stare which I found, and still find, disconcerting.”
Philip Hoare: Leviathan or, The Whale
