Reading Moby Dick is making me sad for the lost autisms
One of them is exemplified by Leatherman. He was a vagabond wearing a Buffalo Bill leather suit, who would walk the same 365 mile circuit in New England month after month. He always returned to the same towns, and would hit up the general store for sardines and beer in monosyllabic French and grunting. He was tolerated, even beloved, and some towns even excluded him, personally, from anti-vagrancy laws.
The Melville-style gay literary autism is incredible. The sperm chapter where they gayly knead the whale sperm until it's smooth as butter and smells delicious, losing themselves in it and beginning to stroke each other's hands, is basically a CT bit. And the whale taxonomy placed right in the middle of the book is one of the most beautifully autistic things I've ever read. He just abandons the narrative and the plot to describe about 2 dozen types of whales and how to differentiate them. There are many chapters like that. There's one where Melville expounds at length about dual-use animal consumption like eating a whale steak by whale candlelight, or picking the goose meat out of your teeth with a goose quill. I mean wtf.
Today's Herman Melvilles are wasting away in gooner discords and will never produce anything creatively unless it's a Factorio set up. Today's Leatherman is a shut-in furry who mods 19 subreddits. I don't think it's too hysterical to say that the internet caused an autistic cultural genocide. There should be a stronger reaction there, like there was to giving deaf people cochlear implants.