How Long Does It Take to Read Moby Dick
Eighteen years ago, while walking through my oceanside college town of Isla Vista, I told my friend Michael Russell that I wanted to take a course on the works of Herman Melville. As the salty smell of nearby seawater wafted through the air, I admitted that I'd never read Moby-Dick.
For a literature major, this seemed tantamount to treason. I thought a academy classroom — under the guidance of (what I imagined would be) a gray-bearded, pipe-smoking, cardigan-clad professor — would be the appropriate venue to finally tackle Melville's 200,000-discussion whaling epic. Michael, who is now the eating house reporter and critic for The Oregonian in Portland, told me, "Don't take that class. There'due south only one mode to read Moby-Dick: Two chapters a dark, at your desk, with a glass of Scotch."
I heeded Michael's advice and didn't enroll in the course. But I never read the book in the way he recommended. Instead I consumed it in a style that's similar to how I've watched the movie Titanic: never in 1 get, spread out over the course of a decade, in dribs and drabs on TBS.
A couple years ago, I bought a handsome paperback edition of Melville's doorstop of a novel (a University of California Press reprint of a 1979 edition — the typeset is Goudy Modern, for all you font fanatics out there). Since then, its fatty spine has glared at me from my bookshelf, daring me to read it in the piecemeal way Michael suggested. So on March 1st, I threw caution to the wind and decided that there was no time similar the present. I took the heavy book off the shelf like a bodybuilder lifting a barbell off a rack, poured myself a tumbler of Scotch and dug in.
***
Within a few days of the launch of my Melville trek, the spread of COVID-19 accelerated in the United States, turning the world equally we know it inside out. Overwhelmed by the grimness of the news each twenty-four hours, slumber became difficult and feet, like an ominous gray fog, crept in. My Moby-Dick readings dwindled from ii capacity a dark to one, but I kept it up. While reading the news during the day can be a dread-inducing feel, my bedtime visits with Ishmael and the Pequod gave me something to await forrard to. Poring over Moby-Dick is like having Andy from the Headspace app tell you a very irksome story near a whaling trek instead of a guided meditation. In a world rife with decease, disease and political incompetence, spending a few minutes reading Melville before bed began to at-home my nerves.
I wanted to talk to the most knowledgeable person possible near why (and how) Moby-Dick has effectively quelled my anxiety at the end of the day, and why it's a book that's endured for and so long (it was beginning published in October 1851). So I turned to one of my favorite writers, Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea (which was after made into a 2015 movie directed by Ron Howard) and Why Read Moby-Dick, a slim 2011 volume that praises the virtues of reading Ishmael'south tale.
Philbrick, now 63, besides wrote the introduction to the 150th anniversary Penguin Classics edition of the novel, in which he accurately describes Moby-Dick equally "more than a picayune intimidating, as if Shakespeare and the translators of the King James Bible teamed up to write a very weird book most whaling."
I reached out to the publicist at Philbrick'due south publishing house, who told me that he was busy at piece of work on a new projection and non doing press. When I told her what I wanted to interview him about — reading Moby-Dick in a fourth dimension of crisis — she wrote back and said that she checked with him, and of course he'd talk nearly that. I called Philbrick at his domicile on Nantucket. "We've been out here 34 years," he said of the island, the same one where Ishmael begins his journeying. "It'south just my married woman and I here, and our domestic dog. It's weird because a lot of people fled the cities and came here concluding weekend. We don't take all-encompassing medical facilities, and so I don't know how smart that is."
After briefly discussing current events, our conversation shifted to Moby-Dick. I asked him if he institute information technology unusual that I thought of such a fierce, foreign book as a soothing read. "No, non at all," he said. "That's one of the miracles of the book. Just think of the topic: It's a hell ship! They're bound for the end of the globe! And they've got a demonic captain who merely wants to fulfill his existential quest to impale this white whale. What could be more than terrifying? And however considering of the narrator, Ishmael, who is I recollect ane of the more miraculous literary creations ever — he's a spirit of wit and imagination — there'due south an open up-ended generosity about Moby-Dick that is soothing. For me, information technology's an existential survival guide. Information technology's what to read when the worst is mayhap happening, because the world is always on the edge of the catastrophe."
I told Philbrick that the epitome of a demonic helm leading a hell ship to the end of the world seemed a little too on the olfactory organ for our current state of affairs.
"Moby-Dick was written when America was near to fall apart," he responded. "It would take 10 years. That permeates the book, that sense of being on the edge of an abyss, of hanging in there. Merely that's not necessarily what you're feeling equally you read it. You're feeling the wonder of life … but also the darkness."
Moby-Dick has been around for 169 years, although it didn't discover a wide audience in the United States until the 1920s. I asked Philbrick what makes it such an enduring novel, one that'due south been read and studied through catastrophes like Earth Wars, the Great Depression, Vietnam, September 11th and at present the coronavirus. "It's the level of the prose, which is actually poetry, I think," Philbrick said. "The sentences elevate information technology across any specific time. Yous read it and you don't think of antebellum America on the border of the Ceremonious War. It'southward transcendent, and yet information technology'southward full of very specific realities of life."
I'g currently at Affiliate 32 — "Cetology" — the chapter that explicitly and exclusively riffs on whale biological science. It'due south a make-or-break point for a lot of readers. When faced with v,207 words almost marine beefcake, many decide information technology's time to function company with the narrative, heaving it beyond the room in frustration. I've resolved to soldier on, of grade, with my desk and my Scotch. I was curious if Philbrick had a way that he prefers to read the volume.
"I've read it about a dozen times," he said. "But I'g e'er returning to it. For me, it'due south like the Bible. You merely open it up. I actually take it on my phone. Back when I was traveling on airplanes, if your flying gets delayed and you're stressed, just open up it up and randomly start reading a affiliate. It has that quality of the rosary, or something similar that."
Philbrick connected, "I don't think there'south any all-time way to read it. I mean, I don't think y'all should binge-read it. You just can't. It's too dumbo. When I was reading it prior to writing Why Read Moby-Dick, I was getting as close as you can to reading it like when you lot're assigned it in schoolhouse, which is horrible. Yous know, when you've got a week to read Moby-Dick. Come up on, that's ridiculous. At that place's no human being on this earth who tin can practice that and requite the volume what it deserves. Then I think exactly what yous're doing is great."
At this point in our chat, Philbrick had to pause for a moment to talk to a neighbor at his front door. When he returned to the call, he returned to my question nearly why Ahab's pursuit of the white whale is a calming story.
"Moby-Dick is soothing and information technology's considering it'south a volume written by a survivor, the sole survivor," Philbrick said. "Ishmael makes it through and it's very significant that he does. Information technology's life-affirming. Even in the midst of all of this happening, the world literally existence completely changed every bit we in one case knew it. Where it will become, who knows? Simply humanity has been through this kind of thing before, and Ishmael is. When you think back to Melville, his reputation wouldn't really survive later Moby-Dick, but he would keep on writing for the residue of his life and die with Baton Budd on his desk, the greatest novella e'er written. There's something to just continuing on. And I think there'south no better companion through it all than Moby-Dick."
***
I wished Philbrick well and thanked him for talking with me. He was kind and generous, non unlike Ishmael. Our conversation reminded me of having office hours with a favorite professor. It was one of those moments of human interaction that, in the era of social distancing, I find myself cherishing.
In my current reading of Moby-Dick, I take 103 capacity to go. If I read a affiliate a day, I should reach the finish erstwhile by the end of June or early on July. I can't envision what the world will look like by then. Then much is uncertain, but as heartbreak, suffering and strife — as well equally compassion, courage and joy — unfold effectually us, Ishmael, Ahab and the crew of the Pequod will continue on their journey, every bit I will on mine.
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Source: https://www.insidehook.com/article/books/how-to-read-moby-dick-quarantine
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