The bit that got me was when the one character falls inside a whale’s oil sack and they are struggling to get him out. That, and making water proof clothing from whales’ foreskins.
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I, too, could not get past even the first page of Moby Dick, but then, I was in 4th grade and attempting to read way beyond my level of comprehension. Since then, I’ve read and enjoyed it at least three times.
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God damn you, sir.
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Or this chapter, which I found depressingly appropriate in Nov 2016, on the eve of the worst political tragedy to befall the United States in modern times:
From Chapter cxxxii - THE SYMPHONY
Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.
Ahab turned.
“Starbuck!”
“Sir.”
“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty - forty - forty years ago! - ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before - and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul - when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey - more a demon than a man! - aye, aye! what a forty years’ fool - fool - old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! - crack my heart! - stave my brain! - mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! - lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!”
“Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s - wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, Sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away! - this instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, Sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”
“They have, they have. I have seen them - some summer days in the morning. About this time - yes, it is his noon nap now - the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”
“Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy’s face from the window! the boy’s hand on the hill!”
But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.
“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new- mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths - Starbuck!”
But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.
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I opted into Modern Lit in high school and was thus never forced to read Dickens, for which I am eternally grateful as I love me some Dickens which I discovered on my own. Read almost all his novels. ‘Great Expectations’ is the Dickens book usually assigned and even I did not care for it the first time around.
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I remember feeling absolutely nothing for The Scarlet Letter back in high school. As a junior in college I took a literature course in American Romanticism, read it again, and loved it.
The conclusion I’ve come to is that classic literature should never be assigned in high-school. All it does is guarantee people wind up hating the classics.
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Did you read it? Was it revelatory?
Thank you for that lengthy segment. It pairs interestingly with the more famous line: “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me”.
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Agreed. I really sat up when someone – is it Ishmael? – dons the skin of a whale penis. It was a point at which I realized that Melville was up to way, way more than just describing how whaling gets done.
ETA: Oops, should’ve finished the thread before responding!
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All art is in the eye of the beholder.
I’ve stated it before that I was spectacularly underwhelmed by most of the classics we were required to read in school; including Moby Dick, the Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, the Great Gatsby, and many others I can’t begin to recall right now.
‘Virtue signaling’ for genuinely liking those works seems a bit needlessly pretentious to me; as it should go without saying that everyone has their own preferences and tastes, and the value each individual gets from reading any book, be it fact or fiction, is always going to vary.
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Has someone in this thread been doing that?
I ask because I didn’t pick it up, and I’m genuinely curious what form that takes. (Hope I didn’t do it!)
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That’s funny. I read The Awakening at a time when my tastes were for sensational speculative fiction and yet I found it impressively compelling.
P.S. I think there may be a quote missing for #4. We never heard Dyson’s dis of Tolkien.
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And yet, when someone dismisses a great book without saying “in my opinion” they are showing not the fault of the book, but the fault of their own imagination.
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Let’s just say that while perusing the comments and responses, I couldn’t get this image out of my mind:
Nah, your comment about whale peen-skin actually made me laugh aloud.
My general stance is this:
More power to people for just about whatever books they choose to read, as long as they do read… the not-so-covert push towards anti-intellectualism and willful ignorance in this day and age has been disturbingly successful; far too many folks seem permanently afflicted by the Dumbening.
“Great” is also in the eyes of the beholder; everyone is allowed to like or dislike whatever they choose for whatever reasons whether we agree with them or not.
Liking or disliking any creative endeavor doesn’t make anyone ‘better’ than anyone else, but for some folks everything is a form of competition… even mere conversations.
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Misinterpretation can happen though. I’m wont to expound on my love for Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, but I hope no one would think I’m doing so out of wanting to appear superior, I do it to evangelize it’s qualities, in case others may enjoy those qualities but need a little encouragement that it will be worth the (substantial) effort. Just as I enjoy others mentioning which books they like and why. Or simply to find other fans. I think more often than not, people mention what books they read to try and make a connection with others, as with any other form of culture.
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Of course it can; we humans are all highly fallible and prone to personal bias… even if some of us seem to forget that sometimes.
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Erm. Anyone who isn’t familiar with Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Grass might get a wrong idea about this…
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Every book their reader, and every reader their book.
De gustibus non est disputandem.
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Lolita is probably the most intriguing, most brilliantly written and linguistically amazing books I have read. I never fully read it in English, but I should. The parts I compared between German, French and English just sparkle in the dark. What a master of language Nabokov was!
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