Strange Moment

I was just reading Moby Dick this evening, and I came to the part where Queequeg gets a fever and ails to the point of death. He asks that a coffin-canoe be made for him by the ship's carpenter, and decks it out with all the trappings for a journey into the afterlife. Pip, the cabin boy driven mad by his abandonment at sea, [the boat he jumped from preferred to chase their prey over retrieving him] comes upon the scene where Queequeg is trying the coffin on for size, and [Pip] gives the following speech:

"Poor rover! Will ye never have done with all this weary roving? Where go ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little erand for me? Seek out one Pip, who's been missing very long: I think he's in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad; for look! he's left his tambourine behind;--I found it. Rig-a-dig-dig! Now Queequeg, die; and I'll beat your dying march." Then, after a comment from Starbuck, the first mate, Pip speaks again:

"Form two and two! Let's make a General of him! Ho, where's his harpoon? Lay it across here.-- Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Huzzah! Oh for a game cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!--mind ye that; Queequeg dies game!--take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; diead all a'shiver;--out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he's a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from the whale-boat! I'd never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all cowards--shame upon them! Let 'em go down like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame!"

And at the moment I read the repetition of the words "Queequeg dies game!" I burst into tears. It surprised me. And they just kept coming; for a good five minutes. I thought of all the noble deaths I knew. I cried at the thought that like the player king in Hamlet, I was crying "for Hecuba" as it were. I felt very pathetic. And I let myself cry for all the other things too. The vanity of human enterprise, all that other bullshit intellectuals are struck to the quick by. I cried because we all die game, if you use the rubric of Conrad Aiken's Tetelestai. I let myself cry because my life is not content now, and I may die that way. I cried to think of how unlike Hamlet I may leave this world, not heralded as a General, but simply consigned to mortality like everyone. Some of my tears (like these) were very vain and selfish. But I believe C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that there is nothing better for one than to have a good cry once in a while. I don't know who reads this blog anymore. Don't pity me. I am no different than any of the rest of us. Tonight was just my turn to be struck with the awareness of it. I feel better now I think.