But there you are. Try to go back to the savages, and you feel as if your very soul was decomposing inside you. That is what you feel in the South Seas, anyhow: as if your soul was decomposing inside you. And with any savages the same, if you try to go their way, take their current of sympathy. Yet, as I say, we must make a great swerve in our onward-going life-course now, to gather up again the savage mysteries. But this does not mean going back on ourselves. Going back to the savages made Melville sicker than anything. It made him feel as if he were decomposing. Worse even than Home and Mother. And that is what really happens. If you prostitute your psyche by returning to the savages, you gradually go to pieces. Before you can go back, you _have_ to decompose. And a white man decomposing is a ghastly sight. Even Melville in Typee. We have to go on, on, on, even if we must smash a way ahead. So Melville escaped. And threw a boat-hook full in the throat of one of his dearest savage friends, and sank him, because that savage was swimming in pursuit. That's how he felt about the savages when they wanted to detain him. He'd have murdered them one and all, vividly, rather than be kept from escaping. Away from them--he must get away from them--at any price. And once he has escaped, immediately he begins to sigh and pine for the "Paradise." Home and Mother being at the other end even of a whaling voyage. When he really was Home with Mother, he found it Purgatory. But Typee must have been even worse than Purgatory, a soft hell, judging from the murderous frenzy which possessed him, to escape. But once aboard the whaler that carried him off from Nukuheva, he looked back and sighed for the Paradise he had just escaped from in such a fever. Poor Melville! He was determined Paradise existed. So he was always in Purgatory. He was born for Purgatory. Some souls are purgatorial by destiny. The very freedom of his Typee was a torture to him. Its ease was slowly horrible to him. This time he was the fly in the odorous tropical ointment. He needed to fight. It was no good to him, the relaxation of the non-moral tropics. He didn't really want Eden. He wanted to fight. Like every American. To fight. But with weapons of the spirit, not the flesh. That was the top and bottom of it. His soul was in revolt, writhing forever in revolt. When he had something definite to rebel against--like the bad conditions on a whaling ship--then he was much happier in his miseries. The mills of God were grinding inside him, and they needed something to grind on. When they could grind on the injustice and folly of missionaries, or of brutal sea-captains, or of governments, he was easier. The mills of God were grinding inside him. They are grinding inside every American. And they grind exceeding small.