But he'll eventually eat his words

The Library of Congress was created on this day in 1800.

"Every man with a belly full of the classics is an enemy of the human race." -- Henry Miller.

The whale of the world

Moby-Dick was published on this day in 1851.

"A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read." – Mark Twain.

Moby-Dick sold only 3,000 copies in Herman Melville's lifetime.

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life," Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, "when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own."

Read more about Herman Melville's view of life (and death) at farewells.blogspot.com.