Moby-Dick as my Bible

For a few years after I read Moby-Dick the first time, I often picked it up to reread certain chapters or passages. I stopped after a while—there were other books—but continued to carry some passages with me over the years. 

“Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.” (ch.68)

This for instance has long been part of the blog.

Moby-Dick is one of the books that mean the most to me partly because it’s three books in one: a novel about the obsessive pursuit of a whale, a whale and whaling encyclopaedia, and a philosophical book.

“All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.” (ch.41) 

O man, beware of becoming Ahab! 

“Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!

[…] Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.” (ch.96) 

Great works of art such as Moby-Dick should not be reduced to self-help, but we love some books more than others not just because of literary merit, but because they resonate with us, because they reach something in us, because for some reason they stay with us over the years. Moby-Dick speaks to me. 

PS: Speaking of the Bible, about last month or so, I bought the King James Bible. Going to have to read it at some point.