What a joy it is to be reading Moby-Dick again! I’m actually listening to it for the first time, and it’s truly delightful. To dart about town while I contemplate man’s water-induced reveries puts me in a fabulous mood, and I realize I’m a better observer when I’m spending time with my good friend Ishmael. When I’m in Ishmael’s head, everything is more meaningful, but not in a disagreeable, I’m-over-thinking this way, but rather in a way that lets me be thoughtful and observant but also not take anything too seriously. Love it.
What quotes, passages, chapters are particularly appealing, revolting, challenging or wonderful to you?
Melville is clairvoyant. A century and a half later and the Fates (the Morerae) are still imposing the same troubles on us:
Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN
Yes!…chilling. All is the same across all meridans…and I guess meridans of time? (Is that too much of a stretch?
Queequeg realizes that “it’s a wicked world in all meridians” (of space AND time)–ch.12
I was concurrently reading Dave Ramsey’s “Total Money Makeover” when I started Moby-Dick and so this passage struck me as particularly timely:
“The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, – what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!”
Yes, how cheerfully!
The Chart – Chapter 44!! It has it’s own special bookmark in my favorite copy (yes I own multiple copies)
I feel this chapter really condenses the driven and intense nature of Ahab. The marks on the map that are now manifesting in the wrinkles on his brow? The fact that he self-crucifies every sleepless night? It’s perfect.
From ch. 9–(“The Sermon”):
For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, ‘that he paid the fare thereof’ ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of meaning…. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
Reminds me of the recent airplane bombing attempt and how the perpetrator paid for his ticket in cash (another uncanny modern coincidence along with the Afghanistan war and the 2000 American contested election).
Here’s another sentence that has grabbed me. It’s from Chapter 49 The Hyena.
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.”
Practical joke, indeed.
Once again, I am struck by a contemporary comparison to something described by Melville.
After 9-11, families here in the New York area lost loved ones without the psychological benefit of burying the deceased.
Likewise, in “The Chapel,” Ishmael ponders the grief of relatives sitting in church “steadfastly eyeing” the memorial tablets:
“Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.”
One of my favorite passages, one that lives vividly in my memory: Ishmael’s walk to and arrival at the Spouter-Inn, and his meeting of the strange, powerful Queequeg. The whole sequence is dreamlike, profoundly odd, inexplicably moving. In my opinion, one of the finer passages in American literature. Also hypnotic: The sermon in the chapel.