Starting Moby-Dick, #7

"Say you are in the country, in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries – stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region… Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever."

So this will be an action story, by and by. But it begins as meditation. Even some of the action will look like meditation. When the action entirely takes over, when meditation entirely disappears – that's when this narrator felt truly erased and, afterwards, truly terrified.