“Oh God! that a man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through!”

All Delight behind them, Moby Dick is finally spotted and they do battle with him! He really is like a ghost from the deep rising up as if shot from hell for their troubles.

I don’t really find Ahab to be mad. He’s a successful whaling captain (40 years) who sees a chance at greatness, if for dubious reasons. He’s very alive and awake.

Harnessing the power of nature with the turned compass needle, converting a coffin into a life preserver to drag behind the ship, the image of a man first falling from the mast then into a soap of white bubbles and disappearing forever. The Rachael with her grieving captain and Ahab’s terrible reply. Pip gone mad, Ishmael as narrator a ghost now and hardly heard from as he drifts aboard the ship and into their minds.

It’s all doom and gloom on the poor Pequod. Queequeg getting measured for a coffin, old whale bones covered in moss, Ahab forging his own harpoon, the jolly Bachelor making her way (funny name for a ship) back home full of cargo in every hold and a captain as happy as Ahab is mad.

You can feel the whale now, feel it just over the horizon, waiting, maybe even watching. Death speeding to more death.

Beautiful.

It’s sad how wrong Melville was about the sustainability of whale hunting. His view was so romantic, from an artistic point of view, that he assumed the whale to be nearly immortal and a theme greater than all of man’s endeavors. Yet at the same time he ships with a mad captain hell-bent on killing one whale who took a leg – imagine a thousand such investors all mad for the whole see of whales?! So very complex man

This book wouldn’t work at all if it wasn’t for how beautifully written it is because he teases out the white whale for so long that you feel just as insane to get to him as Ahab does.

And that’s the art here. While we SHOULD be reveling in the beautiful sea, the glory of the biology of the whale, the wonder of sailing, all we can think about is “get on with it, man! To the white whale and slay him already!”

I love his description of the herds of whales, especially the scene describing the newborn calf, its tail still folded from having been so long gestating. There is a beautiful tenderness to all this and it’s very human-like. The large males with their harems, the riotous young males like collegiate hooligans, the old, wise, lone men.

All that juxtaposed with Pip alone at sea, shapes moving below him; helpless.

Obsessed with something you cannot understand, a monster with no face, who presents only his backside to you in anger, a beast of pyramidical silence.

Though we get nearly nothing of Ahab, we feel this obsession through Ishmael’s scientific and philosophic wanderings. But what is Ahab pondering all this time?

Melville knows full well the mythic of the tale and links it to the great legends of old.

Here we get the, both true and pseudo, in which we learn every inch of the whale, every bone, every vertebrae, its eyes, small ears, and every other part. Yet this is a dead whale and we can learn nothing of its life. We can surmise all we want but even in pulling apart every atom of the monster we are no closer to understanding it than we are the bottom of a black hole.

How true this is for so many things.

“Speak, thou cast and venerable head,”

Now there’s an image, the mad captain speaking to the severed head of a whale asking it to give up its secrets.

That whole chapter (70) is stunning.

Fervent madness abounds with that Shaker, Gabriel.

There is much of sermons and beliefs, and Melville seems skeptical of it all. Perhaps listening to sharks feasting on whale carcass is enough to make man agnostic.

I wonder how much of the whaling industry you could replicate based solely from this book? Sort of like how much of Dublin could you recreate from Ulysses? Probably a good, fair amount.

I like how Ishmael has ideas for the improvement of whaling: give the harpooner less rowing to do so he can hit his mark better. He sounds like me complaining about how the giant corporation I work for SHOULD operate.

Ah, the description of Ahab in his cabin, the water still dripping off of him, his eyes fixed on the tattle-tale: madness! He’s like a thing come from the sea itself.

Sometimes I can barely comprehend his brilliant this novel is. I mean, it’s so far and away unlike anything I’ve ever experienced as to make it more than a novel, it’s like obsession itself materialized in ink and paper.

Texture.

There are numerous passages in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom where Lawrence goes into microscopic detail of the environment – the sand, the rocks, the water, the clouds, the vegetation – that it can be forgiven to skim over those parts and back to the action. But they are written for a reason: to give texture to the story. That desert is what the Arab’s fought for and these whales are what Ahab fights with.

I love, love how each chapter builds upon the previous and sets up the next. Everything he writes is like a symphony, each word is a perfect note that compliments the next. I can hardly comprehend how brilliant this is.

Ahab’s speech to the crew, though famous on its own (I’m looking at you Star Trek VI), is like nothing else; like the voice of God commanding Moses to flee Egypt.

The freedom of the crow’s nest.

Now that’s how you introduce a character!

I love his own romanticizing of whaling, how he talks about what oil is used to anoint kings as if to grease the machinery inside the royal head. And then he goes on to describe who makes up a whaling ship, how it’s run by white men but the harpooning all done by men from more exotic locales.

Sailing south from the cold to the warm seas. Beautiful and well written.

The religious currents of the book are, though obvious, quite fitting. The whole island having been founded by Quakers lends whaling to a very religious zeal of activity. The parallels to Jonah, the sermon, Queequeg’s Ramadan, are all in keeping with the theme that has since become “obvious”.

Yet to see the book play out, to actually read it and experience it is quite unlike just knowing what the book is about.

It’s impossible to not get lost in the language of the novel. This isn’t just a book, it’s something more like an epic poem. I can’t get over how beautifully written this is!

Interesting contrast between the sermon (great sermon, too) and Queequeg saving the man’s life. Who is really a sinful heathen? Race issues are more complex than you would think, too.

The chowder! Smells like childhood; my home New England

I’ve never read Moby Dick; now is the time to remedy that.

I never knew that, at least so far, the book is so funny. For some reason I always imagined the novel to be sort of dry and serious. But that’s not the case. The book is overflowing with energy and good doses of humor. The entire scene of Queequeg in the bedroom is very funny and also menacing. A strange combination to introduce the character.