Moby Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville

    Classics can be hit or miss, but this was a huge hit for me. Moby Dick is one of the best books I have ever read, and I know I will be coming back to it for years to come. Melville writes language that is so close to being over the top, but writes with such confidence and skill that it works. The language is super Romantic and makes clear that Melville is in love with whales and whaling. His passion is just poured on the page and you can tell that he knew he was doing something here.

    The one thing that takes away from the book is the intense racism of its narrator. Melville was probably racist himself. The book seemed to start out with a lot more racist language and then eased up, but I might have just gotten used to it and managed to ignore it. I think the argument could be made that that racist perspective is just what should be expected from an 1850s whaler, but it also made it hard to read. For example, in chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," Melville analyzes the titular topic, and talks all about how whiteness usually enhances beauty, going on about how the whiteness of his skin gives "the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe," yet the whiteness of the whale makes it scarier. We could pretend this is just the narrator, but this it Melville expressing his own idea matter-of-factly, just like he would talk about the anatomy of the sperm whale, he would say that the white man is the master of the world.

    But the writing is amazing. I just took note of a few great lines and passages because they deserve to be reprinted here. They're over the top, but something about seeing someone go on for pages about the anatomy of whales and the makeup of whaling ships with references to Greek mythology and classic literature just makes it all work. Melville also writes some chapters with stage directions like a play, and has the sailors break into song.

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map, true places never are.

I just like that line. The next multi-paragraph passage is just a really funny bit on how kings and queens are anointed with whale oil. 

    It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a caster of state. How they use the salt, precisely--who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life, we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.

     But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, not macassar oil, nor castor oil, not bear's oil, nor train oil, nor codliver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?

    Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!

Melville is so funny for dedicating these little chapters to asides like that. That was almost the entire chapter above, and it was just to make a point about how valuable and important whale oil is/was! Here's another:

    As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. It this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-spears!

     In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough the shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!

Here's another one:

 Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

And another:

The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the level field.

You see what he did there with cannonballs into ploughshares like swords into ploughshares? This guy can write! And I love the image of Ahab's death, in the final chapter of the book:

    The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in it's depths.

    I'll finish by saying that this book is so modern. I read it less like a work of fiction than like a modern work of literary-esque nonfiction. I think of The Perfect Storm, a nonfiction book that maintains a really engaging story while still stuffing the reader full of facts about fishing, the Atlantic Ocean, and what drowning is like. Melville is doing that a century earlier, teaching the reader about whaling while using this story. I think this is especially good in chapters 74 and 75, titled, "The Sperm Whale's Head" and "The Right Whale's Head." He introduces these two anatomy lessons from the point of view of the narrator, Ishmael, on the Pequod, giving a tour to the reader as if you were on the ship with him. The tour happens at that moment only because we have reached a point in the events of the book when the ship has two whales' heads tied to either side. So Ishmael says, "Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay together our own," and "as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:--where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here?" How can you not love that?! And then he goes on to tell you about how whale bones are used in umbrellas, and how the whales are even philosophers, with the Right Whale being a stoic and the Sperm Whale a Platonian. Truly one of the best books ever written. I get it.