"I'll die a pagan"

I'm supposed to be reading Moby Dick with a friend. I was also supposed to be blogging. Let's just ignore the hiatus and attempt to get into this thing. First, an aside.

I'm a bad reader. Granted, I'm fast. But I read like I do a great many other things in my life - all at once or not at all. Meaning that whether a book is 150 pages or 1500, I want to read it beginning to end in one sitting. This is great for being able to say that I started at the beginning and saw all the pages hereafter, but it makes for a meaningless journey and sometimes a complete inability to recall anything I just read outside the general structure of the plot. This explains why I gravitate towards the simple stories - the young adult, fantasy, sci-fi, the recurring character series in which the entire series is explained over and over again in the first few pages. I enjoy and have enjoyed more complicated fare, of course, but it just utilizes a whole different part of my personality and brain to do so. Anyway, that's why this has been difficult, in a nutshell. I get distracted when I stop in the midst of a reading, but if I blow through it I can't remember any of it to discuss with others. I finally decided that I would divide the book into 5 portions, each one about 100 pages, and just tackle one piece at a time.

When a friend texted me late one night asking whether I thought the whale from Moby Dick hated Ahab, and then subsequently decided that she wanted to attempt a re-reading of the story to find the answer, I agreed to participate, to change my m.o. I've read it before, for a class in college (Great American Lit). My approach to it back then was kind of amusing. For one, I had a crush on my professor, so I was determined to have his esteem. I even read The Emperor of Ocean Park in my free time because he was giving a talk on it at a school function that I had decided to attend. Nerd-crush. Anyway, I also decided that if I was going to tackle this thing, I was going to do it right. I was not going to use study aids. I was not going to skim when it got boring. I was going to read every single word on those pages so that I could say with all honesty at the end that I had done it. And you know what? I still didn't remember a single thing outside of the general plot. Sure it was like, 8 years ago, but there are just a number of things that stand out to me during this re-reading. I have found myself laughing out loud while reading it. I'm completely entertained by Melville's sense of humor, but also amazed by the poetry of his sometimes over-dramatic tirades. Have I changed so much in those years that these things passed me by back then?

In an effort to parse my writing (I really could use an editor), I'll try to give broad sweeps. You can read the story for yourself, or barring that, you can read the Cliff Notes or Wiki or what have you. I'm just going to say what I thought, pretending that we have all read it and are just having a discussion. Starting with the Extracts/Pre-Chapter text. I'll just say I don't know what the point of it is. Perhaps someone else can enlighten me? To me, the first portion, about the usher, seems to mock a person who would obsess over the words, the names of things. Maybe it is telling us not to be concerned about the names of things, the words one chooses to use. Or maybe it's just the opposite, that words have importance. The second portion, about the sub-sub librarian, also seems to mock obsession. The librarian collects every mention of a whale, but he will never be able to tell the full story. I think it seems like Melville is apologizing in advance for the fact that he will be unable to ever cover all of the bases when it comes to whales, even though he has obsessively tried to do so in the text.

If any book was designed to get you from the start, it's this one. For all that he is clearly and very apparently a learned man and a good writer, Melville created in Ishmael (or re-created himself in Ishmael), a man who defends slaves, cannibals and the riff-raff of sailors. "Who ain't a slave? Tell me that," he says, and he claims that they're the ones who see things first hand and actually determine what happens after that. The first line of the story is a classic, but it's the following paragraphs that get to me. He talks about how the land makes him mean-spirited and how just has to get to sea and away from the land.

Those were the parts that enchanted me. The ones that made me laugh out loud mostly centered around Queequeg, the cannibal that Ishmael befriend's on his land-based journey to the Nantucket ships. I loved imagining Ishmael having a crazy fit when the landlord told him about his roommate being a cannibal and a head-hunter. I could just see the sputtering, the indecision. Their subsequent spooning in bed and Pagan friendship-marriage is bizarre, but for some reason I like the idea of Ishmael having someone to watch his back. It comforts me for some odd reason. Although his cannibal nature worries the Quaker owners-captains of the Pequod at first (even though they are "fighting Quakers...Quakers with a vengeance"), when they see what he could do with a harpoon, Captain Peleg announces: "We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats." I was sad to see the ship disembark and leave Captains Bildad and Peleg behind.

The cannibals and Quakers allow Melville/Ishmael to expound on one of his favorite subjects and mine - religion. It's part of the reason I like Ishmael so much and am so invested in his character's fate. He is an all around accepting and egalitarian man. Husband to a cannibal ("I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy."), tolerant of the religion of others even if it forms no large part of his own personality, and able to see the poetry of a good sermon. I don't think I have ever enjoyed a real-world sermon as much as I loved Chapter 19's sermon in the sailor's chapel; it was as if I had never heard the story of Jonah before now. In one memorable portion, Queequeg asks Ishmael to join him in his evening worship to his idol, named Yogo. Ishmael justifies joining him by saying that to worship is to do the will of God, and the will of God is to follow the Golden Rule. Since Ishmael would have Queequeg join in his own particular form of worship, it follows that Ishmael must join his. That means he has to worship a pagan idol. Clearly, Christians have never really subscribed to the Ishmael school of religious theory. Also, Ishmael should have been a lawyer.

Chapter 23 is one of the shortest chapters (although they're all pretty much just snippets in the grand scheme of things), but I love it's language and the story it tells. Truly, these little "pointless" asides are the reason the story is so long, but who would deny Melville these little jaunts when they're so lovely? For whatever reason, Ishmael is commenting on seeing a familiar face as they're leaving port. His name is Bulkington, and he was a man that Ishmael had encountered when he first sat in Peter Coffin's Inn. A group of whaling men came in from a ship that had just returned to port from a long voyage. This man, Bulkington, had just returned from one voyage only to sign up for another on the Pequod. "The land seemed scorching to his feet," Ishmael comments. He compares Bulkington to the ship itself. To others, the port and land stand for safety and comfort. But for a ship, land is dangerous. Coming up on the land would destroy her. "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 refuse's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!" This chapter, which Ishmael/Melville calls the stoneless grave of Bulkington, breaks my heart for all of its seeming randomness. There are several instances of Melville doing this - talking about fighting against inevitability. Or that's how I interpret it anyway. For one, the sermon talks about how obeying God is disobeying oneself, and how that's the hardest part. Then, Ishmael ruminates on how he thinks that perhaps this life is just a shadow, and that death is the real thing - that in death he would shed the bad portions of himself and become a better man. Maybe like falling is easier than fighting gravity and staying upright. Now this - the ocean, supposedly a ship's only friend, constantly tries to push her into the land and destroy her, and she must fight to remain out at sea. I'm still thinking on this theme, I'll try to expand on it later, because as of now I still don't know what he's trying to say. Is he saying that it's worth it to fight or not? Is he a fatalist?

So those are some of my impressions, as briefly as someone like me is able. But because there are so many parts that I love, I'll leave you with a few other random bits and pieces of this amazing writing.

"Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions?"

"The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself."

"Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan."

"He was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him."

"Very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another."

"Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans."

"I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug."

"If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication."

"But as in landlessness alone resides the 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!"

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

"It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me."