Moby Dick: What is your whale?
📍Bangkok, Thailand (Issue 203)
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. — Moby Dick by Herman Melville
So, tell me, what is your elusive whale? I'm curious. We are, of course, always seeking a whale to skewer and bring home. We want to show our friends and hang its twelve-foot jaw on our bathroom wall. I have harpooned this promotion! This BMW! This wife! This life! Now, give me my gold doubloon!—the very same doubloon Captain Ahab offered his crew as a reward for spotting the infamous white Sperm Whale on the horizon.
I loved Moby Dick and had fun reading it. It's an adventure, and the climax is worth the voyage; he captures the sense of listlessly floating in the Pacific, with a barren sea at every horizon, entertained only by the rocking of oil lamps and an albatross and the waves that curl like silver scrolls and the nests of rigging. I loved Melville's use of language, his humour, and his playfulness.
Herman Melville writes of expectations, unobtainable goals, and petty human preoccupations. Some believe he was referring only to god. This may be true, but I think he talks about all our arbitrary dreams, not only heaven. These dreams propel our lives along the watery phenomenal plain. Towards what?—toward our soggy grave, of course.
When turning the first page of this novel, it's very helpful and quite inspiring to identify which personal Leviathan we are fishing for: It might be well-defined or (more often) ill-defined, something spiritual or material, practical or mystical or theoretical, near or very far away.
Melville's whale is named Moby Dick; it's a colossal Sperm Whale with a wrinkled brow and a ghastly white complexion. In our own lives, it might be raising the next round of funding, closing a SaaS deal, getting a job, ditching a husband, selling a company, maybe securing an elusive promotion, finding a date, taking out a large loan on a large car, booking some holiday (Bermuda?), building a big house, getting our teeth whitened or a fancy hair implant, or maybe splurging on a jet. These are common whales for modern humans to hunt; each is a blubbery thing. My Leviathan is reaching Japan by bicycle. A mighty Pacific-bound mammal that one is! Not a small goldfish but a dreadnought, a Goliath that'll strain my lines: Some 3,000 kilometres long, it lolls leisurely from the Sea of Okhotsk to the East China Sea.
So these are our whales. We are each a harpoon-wielding whaler—exciting! How do we catch the whale? In every case, we have to leave our zone of comfort. We must sail the English Channel, quit home, learn the language, say hello in some sleazy bar, or ask—apply! beg!—for the new job. We must get far from home and bob at sea, scanning our horizon for storms and whale spouts, puffing on a pipe, muttering—aye, ahoy, etc.—about the alignment of the stars.
And yet, we often allow our whaling to dominate our lives. And we need to remember the cost of our mania. Captain Ahab said his wife became a widow the day she married him because he immediately took to the high seas. Can you imagine? He only spent three years in forty on land, not harpooning Sperm Whales or Humpbacks or Right Whales or Belugas. And on reading of Ahab's monomaniacal hunt for Moby Dick, I wondered how many times I have let my whaling adventure (be it working for others or working for myself or travelling; the whale transforms, she does!) impact my life. And, of course, whenever I'm proverbially whaling, it sucks in everything—you end up like Jonah sitting within some bloody whale; it gobbles us up.
Every new whaling trip invariably disrupts the order created in the wake of the previous. This is the great compromise of everything: we must say goodbye to say hello and sacrifice yesterday for today and be happy with it. Neither voyage is wrong; all whaling routes are correct. Even so, only one can be charted, so we have to decide. Tesson, as always, nails the urgent essential point: to keep moving after new whales and to stay enthusiastic. He writes: "The essential thing is to live one's life with a brave hand on the tiller, swinging boldly between contrasting worlds. Balancing between danger and pleasure, the frigid Russian winter and the warmth of a stove. Never settling, always oscillating from one to the other extremity on the spectrum of sensations."
This month (November ‘24) Hector Hughes and I are reading The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. I’m reading the Michael R. Katz translation which looks great. Do join us! Here’s a quote to whet your appetite:
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
And here’s a final quote from Moby Dick:
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.