Enter the Librarian, a review by Josh HanagarneI have a pair of cufflinks that contain part of Ahab&

Enter the Librarian, a review by Josh HanagarneI have a pair of cufflinks that contain part of Ahab’s last speech: Towards thee I roll.  I’m getting married in October. There’s going to be a Moby Dick themed table at the Mark Twain house where the ceremony is being held. I think I’m going to paint a watermelon white and try to cut teeth in it.  I spent an hour last week looking for antique harpoons on eBay, so I can hang one in the room where I write. They’re surprisingly affordable.  As I type this, I keep looking down at my right forearm, which is tattooed from wrist to elbow with the eponymous white whale, smashing the Pequod into smithereens. In April I’ll begin adding an inky version of Ahab to the piece.  The mania started early. My first copy of Moby Dick was a fifty page, illustrated classics version when I was five years old. I asked for a fake harpoon for my sixth birthday, despite living in landlocked New Mexico.  I’ve probably read the unabridged, uncondensed version fifty times at this point, and may very well it fifty times more before I’m done.  But why? I’m not exactly sure. Therein lays the fascination. I can’t stop reading it. I know I never will.  If you haven’t read Moby Dick, you’d probably say it’s the story of Captain Ahab’s doomed voyage to kill the white whale, the whale that took his leg. But that description—you have to put something on the dust jacket, after all—does no justice to what it feels like to read Moby Dick.  To really commit to carefully, consistently experiencing it. There’s nothing else like it. Nothing.  It’s a long book. It’s a difficult book. I don’t argue with people who say it bores them. It’s strange and confusing and, yes, it’s full of whaling minutiae and late-night, tangential, homoerotic spermaceti sessions on desk, and there are wild digression about the race of man and the id and the superego and the nature of covenants and seers.  But why do you read? For entertainment? Enlightenment? Education? Escapism? I read for all of these reasons, and I read Moby Dick for all of these reasons.  But most importantly, I think, Melville understood what it was like to be human. Read the Ahab scenes, at the very least, and tell yourself that Melville didn’t understand rage, obsession, depression, and sorrow?  Can you picture a man so consumed with fury that he would take a swing at the sun? Well, try this:  “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!”  That is, perhaps, my favorite line in all of literature, growled by Captain Ahab. By the time you hear that line, you’ll know that he means it.  Ask me why I do or don’t like any book I’ve read, and I’ll be able to tell you my reasons, ad nauseum. But ask me why I’m compelled to return to Moby Dick, over and over, and I’ll stammer. I think I know why, but I can’t be sure. I can’t convince you with the plot. The plot is tiny, the novel is immense. But I hope describing the book’s effect on me makes you curious enough to try reading it, or to try again. If nothing else, please just read the Ahab scenes. And make sure you read the escalations during the final whale chase. I defy anyone to find a more cinematic, intense, chaotic sequence in all of literature.   Moby Dick has taught me more about anger, sorrow, suffering, obsession, failures, depression, camaraderie, spirituality, hatred, the color white, Gnosticism, tattoos, and love than anything else I can think of.  And I’m not alone. For better or worse, how many times have you felt like that about a book, or any other piece of art?  It matters. As to why it matters so much to me, the reasons change. So I’ll keep chasing it, wondering about it, and suspecting that it’s not entirely within my control.  -- source link

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