Moby Dick Has Been Popping Up

 I like Moby Dick. I re-read the novel in prison. I meant to read all I could of Melville as a person of some importance to me once said he was America's greatest novelist. Yes, I know the book is off-putting to many people. I can only say read it on its own terms, which can be many, including a simple adventure story.

But still I was surprised to have the novel pop up through Google twice in a week.

Aaron Sachs over at The Conversation wrote the following under the headline The lessons ‘Moby-Dick’ has for a warming world of rising waters:

What makes “Moby-Dick” especially relevant right now is that it offers a spur to solidarity and perseverance. Those are qualities societies may need to stock up on as we face the overwhelming threat of climate change. The novel has no straightforward moral, but it does remind readers that we can at least buoy each other up, even as the water swirls around us.

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 Again and again, “Moby-Dick” forces readers to confront despair. But that doesn’t make it a grim read, or a paralyzing one – in part because Melville himself is such an engaging companion, and much of the book imparts a powerful sense of fellowship.

 Meanwhile over at Biblioklept there is A Careful Disorderliness | Forty Riffs on Moby-Dick with too much to properly quote. Not that I won't try:

I. I last reread Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick in full way back in 2013.

II. I’ve read chunks and excerpts of it over the intermittent seven years though—there’s always some bit in it that calls to me, prompted by events personal, political, cultural. I read Melville’s 1846 novel Typee during the beginning of 2020’s quarantine, and knew I’d need to reread M-D in full sooner than later.

III. (Why later, why now? I guess I made this kinda sorta tacit promise to myself not to reread in 2020—to expand my palate, to go past all the Dead White Guys.)

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XXI (Excepting, I would add: I think Melville loads so much in this near-final image of his big book. There are only two paragraphs after this one: a scant sentence that’s basically an exhalation from the image of a submerged Tashtego nailing a hawk to the mast of the sinking Pequod—and then the Epilogue. The Pequod takes its name from an extinct Native American tribe. Tashtego is doubly-denied his due as the First to raise whale. Melville seems to point back to America’s founding as a genocidal project here. I probably need to reread the book again, I now realize. Or maybe read some commenters on this matter that I’ve yet to read. I hate to stick this thought in parentheses, as it’s the thing that interests me the most at the end of this reread—Tashtego the Indian, I mean.)

See? It does inspire broadly. May you read it and be likewise inspired.

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