Herman Melville's tombstone in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx portrays a blank page, supposedly representing the blank page at the end of life.
When I get overwhelmed I dream about getting on a ship and sailing away. The wide open seas call to me on from the land and I wish I could spend my times riding the waves.
I like to believe the writer Herman Melville must have felt that way. He gave us the adventure novel Moby Dick, a tale that has excited people for generations. The book is believed to be based on an 18-month voyage he took on a whaler from New Bedford, Massachusetts, around Cape Horn to the South Pacific.
Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819 and died in New York City in 1891. Buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, the front of Melville’s tombstone displays a sculpted blank page. Legend says the single blank pages represents the blank page at the end of life. That’s a pretty gutsy way for a writer to make a final statement. Or maybe he just wanted us to finish the story.
Or maybe that blank “statement” was his way of getting back at some people. It was said that around the time of his death he was so forgotten that there were probably more people who believed he had died years earlier than knew he was still alive.
I find it amusing, however, that Melville, so identified with the sea, was buried in the only borough of New York on Continental United States and not on one of the island boroughs!
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Surprising to me Melville was a NYC man. I liked the theory of the blank page left for the observer to fill in, as if to say, “You write my epitaph.” Thanks for sharing this literary tidbit.
I love that tombstone. He leaves a mystery of his feelings, letting us contemplate what he wanted to say. Or, maybe he had writer’s block.
Glad you’re back.
Nice to see the blog up and active again.