Nathaniel Philbrick's
Why Read Moby Dick? is a great incentive to reread Melville's masterpiece. In addition to plot tidbits, Philbrick gives the reader many facts about whaling, Melville, and the latter's relationship with his reluctant friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Philbrick also brilliantly points out correspondences between pre-Civil War U.S. and parallels to the U.S.today. Each short chapter ends with an enlightening—if mildly irritating—moral tag.
Irritation aside, some of Philbrick's observations lend themselves to inspirational axioms. Here are a few of my favorite extracts from
Why Read Moby Dick? I've italicized the back story to my quotes from Philbrick.
Page 122
Melville visits Nantucket a year after writing Moby Dick and meets George Pollard, captain of the whaling ship Essex, which was destroyed by its prey. Philbrick writes that Pollard was a "quiet, reserved survivor who had learned to live with disappointment."
For someone who has ceased to believe in his own immortality (and as we shall soon see, Melville had reached that point), life isn't about achieving your dreams; it's about finding a way to continue on in spite of them.
Page 126
After his death, Melville's family finds a possible clue to how Melville "managed to survive the forty-year backlash left by the creation of Moby Dick" (Melville worked for nearly two decades as a customs inspector after Moby Dick was published to unkind reviews) . . . .
Atop a table piled high with papers was a portable writing desk. Taped inside the desk, which had no bottom, was a piece of paper with a motto printed on it: "Keep true to the dream of thy youth."
SPOILER ALERTThe very last paragraph of Philbrick's
Why Read Moby Dick? is as insightful as the rest of the slim volume (yup; I actually wrote "slim volume").
In the end, Melville had found a way back to the view espoused by Ishmael in Moby Dick: "Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye." This redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope, this genial stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read Moby Dick.
Philbrick's book and summary above is why I may reread
Moby Dick. But first, intrigued by the history and the tale that so struck Melville and impressed by Philbrick's writing, I will probably read, Philbrick's
In the Heart of the Sea.
