The earliest memory I have of Moby Dick is mixed up with another book I read as a child, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. The book keeps time for me, measuring out the different turning points in my own experience. This wasn’t a purposeful decision: I just found myself drawing out the reading for as long as I possibly could. Sometimes I read large parts of the book in a single sitting one spring, I read tiny bits of it, day by day, over three months.

The book always feels different, even while it is also comfortingly familiar. I have read (and loved to read) Moby Dick for a long time: I can’t remember my first time reading it, so completely is it layered in my memory.

Watch out! You might fall in you might drown in this bottomless blueness. “Perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon,” he writes, “but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul” ( chapter 35, “The Mast-Head”). Melville describes being at the top of the mast, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the distant watery spout that signals the presence-the distant presence-of whales. These are the very moments of the book that haunt me. For those that like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that they like for those forced to read the novel in a classroom, under constraint, not so much. Sometimes the narrator is telling us about each of the many parts of the ship or giving us a minutely detailed account of the whale’s anatomy. For the vast majority of this novel, we are at sea sometimes we’re up in the Crow’s Nest, looking out on billows upon billows of foamy water. The sailors wait and watch, and we wait and watch, as the whales harvest their oceanic fields: “As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea” ( chapter, 58, “Brit”). At least, many of them hate it, forced to plow through acres of narrative in which nothing much happens. They read it-or are told to read it-as a Modernist novel written half a century before the first glimmerings of “Modernism” as a movement in art and literature.Īnd they hate it.

They read it for its symbolism for its eerie evocation of American nationalism, on the cusp of Civil War for its just barely-not even!-sublimated homoeroticism. Most people encounter this book in a class, usually on American Literature, or on The Novel. I can’t remember the first time I read Moby Dick. –Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 32, “Cetology” This whole book is but a draught-nay, but the draught of a draught.

God keep me from ever completing anything. For small erections may be finished by their first architects grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. “But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.

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