How I Read a Moby-Book

Everybody read Moby Dick in school, whether high school or college. (And let's get this out of the way right now: No hyphen.)

I'm glad I got to read it at Grinnell under the guidance of my English Yoda, Richard Cleaver. I still hear his gentle voice extolling the virtues of Henry James--and that re-reading him is what retirement was for. I'm for Melville, however, but really can't afford to wait until retirement to enjoy my nineteenth century.

I am a slow reader. A very slow reader. I just finished rereading the beat-up paperback edition I had in college days, and it took over three years. Note the boarding passes as bookmarks. (To my credit, I did read a couple of other things during this time, too, including Doris Kearns Goodwin's 800-page Team of Rivals.)

And I read word by word, often imagining being read to by a great voice. Sam Waterston would be a great Moby Dick voice. And I scribble in the margins. I look stuff up if I can't figure it out, and there's a lot I couldn't figure out in Moby Dick. Even Shakespeare could be more accessible at times.

I have at least two hard cover editions of Moby Dick, including one that's part of a humongous (and hence unreadable) collection of unabridged Melville novels. These look nice on my bookcase. I also have a Kindle version loaded on my netbook, which I haven't inspected yet. (My "Complete Shakespeare" on Kindle omitted all of the plays that were categorized as Romances, so bye-bye Tempest, Cymbeline, and Winter's Tale.)

I have little interest in trying to read Moby Dick electronically anyway. I rather enjoyed seeing "my" notes in the margins. My handwriting was so fussy and fine in those days. And I know perfectly well, even 35 years later, those were not my thoughts in the margins. They were Mr. Cleaver's.

"Whitmanesque" on page 123. What a laugh. I might be able to pick a Whitman poem out of a line-up of Poe and something in the New Yorker, but just forget it you think I'd think of Whitman while reading Melville.

That said, there is poetry in Moby Dick. There's theater in Moby Dick. There's encyclopedias, bibles, art, anthropology, mathematics, history, and every book in every library in Moby Dick. There's not just the whale stuff, there's everything. There is quantum physics before there was quantum physics. From Chapter 41, "Moby Dick" (page 183 in the above edition):

One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.

Mostly, for me, there is a philosophy in Moby Dick that has shaped my worldview since Mr. Cleaver's class sometime in the mid-1970s. In one of the many levels that Cleaver encouraged us to consider Moby Dick was Ishmael's acceptance of everyone else's worldview. And it was Ishmael who was saved. Cause and effect? That universal (even ubiquitous) acceptance is our ultimate salvation? 

I don't know. I have tried to live by that idea, though. That's one reason why I wanted to reread Moby Dick. 

A quick Internet search reveals that I'm not the only re-reader of Moby Dick to stop short on the reference to the "now egotistical sky" (Chapter 79, "The Prairie," page 335 of my edition). The question I scribbled to myself in the margin here: "God is egotistical? or man has inserted his ego into the deity's domain?"

A former-English-teacher friend of mine tried to explain something about Melville's critique of the Transcendentalists of his time. I may go read up on that at some point. (In addition to being very very slow, I am frequently very very lazy.) I'll simply redirect the philosophically inclined toward the New York Times Opinionator blog dated December 5, 2010, by Sean D. Kelly, "Navigating Past Nihilism." 

The deep thinkers of the nineteenth century were struggling over Nietsche's atheism (God is dead) and the fanaticism (exclusivity) of many religious believers. The elevation (transcendence) of humanism was one alternative. Kelly writes that Ishmael's (Melville's) acceptance of these multiple worldviews could be called "polytheism." The term doesn't quite satisfy me, but I don't want to be a stickler for semantics. Polytheism wouldn't include humanism.

But I do like what Kelly writes here:

Melville hoped for a life that steers happily between two dangers: nihilism and fanaticism. ... Melville himself seems to have recognized that the presence of many gods—many distinct and incommensurate good ways of life—was a possibility our own American culture could and should be aiming at. The death of God therefore, in Melville’s inspiring picture, leads not to a culture overtaken by meaninglessness but to a culture directed by a rich sense for many new possible and incommensurate meanings. 

The pursuit of a good way of life. And as simple as that sounds, that's what it's all about. I'm not sure if that's what Mr. Cleaver was telling us back in the day, but it's a good takeaway now.

Love, hosaa

Mobied