In Moby Dick, Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner, suffers a fever and, believing himself to be near death, asks that his body be sent out to sea in a canoe, as the Nantucketers do, 'for it was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way'.
I remember this because I am listening to the Big Read's Moby Dick project, and because, when I went out for a short run tonight, I found it cold, clear and starry.
