Missing Moby Dick

On these recent cold winter evenings, I find myself thinking about Moby Dick.

This fall and winter, I read one chapter a night, and in that way finally finished the book, all 135 chapters of it.

I was inspired by the Moby Dick Big Read, which I read about in the newspaper and heard about on NPR. At first, I didn't take the bait.  I'd tried reading Moby Dick several times before and always got bogged down even before they left the shore.  That endless ridiculous  scene at the inn, with Queequeg and Ishmael--that just stopped me in my tracks.  In fact, I eventually owned my inability to finish the book, laughing with some friends at a graduate school gathering about being part of a "No Mobys" club--people who'd never read the book.

Let me remind you that I was at graduate school studying English, so probably I shouldn't have been proud.

But then sometime this fall my brother told me he was downloading the podcasts on the Big Read site, and my friend Carol told me she was reading it. "Just one chapter a night, that's all," she told me.

Well, I could do that.  And so I started.  I downloaded the book on my new Kindle and began reading on September 21.

Not only did I get past my usual stopping point at the Spouter Inn . . . I began to enjoy reading.  Once they were out on the ocean, I sometimes had trouble stopping after one chapter at a time.  And I finished the book on January 20.

Last week, my friend Lisa and I were talking about Moby Dick.  She remembers Garrison Keillor talking disparagingly of Moby Dick once, and she was put out.  "It's a wonderful book," she said.  "It has some of the best American writing about nature!"  I agreed, and we talked about some passages we loved.

So if you're like me, and don't think you'd ever read Moby Dick, I encourage you to open your heart to The Whale!

Here are some things that are really cool about it:

• It has some great nonfiction writing--some chapters shared lively information about life on a sailing ship in the 19th century--how the ship was run, how the people worked together, how they went out in the whaling boats.  
• I also loved his chapters about the whales themselves, classifying the whales into "folios" by size:   I.  The Sperm Whale; II.  The Right Whale; III The Fin Back Whale . . .  The descriptions of each type of whale were so interesting that I had to look up pictures.  Here's one Melville might have looked at:

• Ishmael's description of being up in the rigging might make you want to go to sea!:

"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, pervading mankind and nature . . ."

• When Ishmael and his fellow sailors were out hunting whales, they found themselves in the midst of a whale nursery.  Mother and child whales came right up to the boats.  The passage is so touching.  

". . . we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion. . . these \smaller whales--now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake--evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence . . .  like household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them.  Queequeg patted their foreheads. . . "

• Almost impossible to read were the chapters about the whale hunt in the middle of the book.  I think Melville meant them to be awful:

"the red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill.  His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake."
and
"It was most piteous, that last expiring spout."

Poor whale.

• There are several moving stories about tragedies that have happened aboard passing ships.  What a story about the ship called The Rachel--the captain's young son had gone out on a whaling boat and the boat had been dragged out to see and lost.
• OK, that last few chapters when Ahab hunts Moby Dick . . . those are pretty awesome! And I had to read that very last chapter several times--WOW!

Maybe the best way to read this book is a chapter at a time.  It's long and gives one a lot to think about.  And I have to admit, I skimmed over the parts where Ahab goes on and on in stilted oratorical language . . . blah.  Ahab's not the heart of this book; the ocean is, and whales.

Of course, my friend Wendy (a Victorian scholar and feminist) points out that Moby Dick has everything in it . . . except women!  So after you read Moby Dick, or before you do, I recommend  Ahab's Wife.