..One more silly thing on 'Moby Dick'

I have been meaning to do this for a while. In Microsoft Word, there's a tremedously silly feature called 'AutoSummarize' that condenses long texts into shorter versions. It can be set to highlight key points or spit out summaries of various lengths. It's a hoot.

I put in Chapter 42 of Melville's Moby Dick and told it I wanted a summary that was 5% of the original text. Here's what it gave me:

What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Goney! never! Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe.

Yipes. If you jack it up to 10%, you get the sentence "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me", which is also in the first paragraph.