Moby Dick was a surprisingly rewarding reading experience. Surprising, because it is one of those books one has often heard about, but the reading of it was completely different from any of the heard instances. It was a refreshingly fun, some sort of live-wire energy flowing through it.
Everything about the book was delightful - the language, its poetry, the tone, the intonations, the subject matter or the main preoccupation of the narrator, the world it describes. And then, add to it a series of essays interwoven in the narrative. I call it a series of essays because each one begins anew and afresh - and opens up a new world for you, again and again. Each one has that fresh energy. And then throughout the book are fabulous passages one wishes to share with the world, or take the people around you by hand and make them read those passages. Usually such fabuolous, deep writing tends to be about life and philosophy interwoven with the narrative or the story - layered and deep - what I perhaps mean to say is that the quality of the writing or the richness is because of the writer's thoughts interspersed throughout the book which shed a unique light on life and world, and in that, connect to something deep within the reader – to bring home to reader’s own life and world.
In their keenness to share an entirety with you, a world with you, they provide a resting pace to the reader. There is no clamor for the reader's attention - there is just a giving, a sharing of the world of writer's mind. Here that mind is on the surface occupied with Moby Dick and whaling. But that is just the surface. All the talk about whales and people on the boat seems just like the top layer of some deeper philosophical thought. I say philosophical – the word stands in for anything that connects deeply to the life and world of the reader irrespective of whales, boats or the life one leads. It addresses that deep wonder and question which as humanity we all share consciously or unconsciously at some level, about life, its meanings, its context in this universe, and just how to go about living well, if that provide some meaning.
Books like these have a richness of a whole world in them, and seem to keep on giving on every reading. Every encounter is a new encounter – the richness of language, the freshness, the depth. I’ll probably be surprised and delighted afresh on meeting those lines. And I think of Infinite Jest and the generosity of DFW. I think of War and Peace. Or how I felt after closing Don Quixote. Joys of good writing!
To anyone who has not read it, and who enjoys reading fiction, this is a book worth spending slow hours on. And to close this post, here sharing Chapter 23 in its brief entirety:
The Lee Shore.Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!