Herman Melville: Moby Dick - In der Kapelle

"Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. [...] these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:

 SACRED  TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT,         

Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard           

Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,                 

November 1st, 1836.                          

THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER.      

           

            

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY,            

NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY,  AND SAMUEL GLEIG,                  Forming one of the boats' crews  OF THE SHIP ELIZA              

Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, 

                  On the Off-shore Ground in the  PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839.                     THIS MARBLE  Is here placed by their surviving  SHIPMATES. 

       SACRED  TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY,           Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan,                        August 3d, 1833.                           

THIS TABLET  Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW. 

Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh. Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! [...]
how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings. But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.  

(Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Kap. 7 )