Moby Dick

I have always been afflicted by the dilemma that there are so many books and so little time.  It is for this reason that I used to be reluctant to read the same book twice, but now as age creeps upon me I have come to realize that I shall pass from the world leaving masterpieces unopened.  Instead of rendering me deprived and bitter, this understanding has turned me mellow as an old briar pipe. 

Perhaps some inkling of it was the reason certain volumes remained on my shelves, surviving cruel cuttings to make room for newer books. I have, for example a nice set of The Lord of the Rings, which came, as I recall, as a bonus from the Book of the Month Club, to which I once belonged.  These supplanted the tattered paperback copies that everyone read in the sixties. I dip into the books from time to time because they take me back to Middle Earth as it was before the movies imagined it for me.

 I have the Modern Library edition of Moby Dick, a relic of my college days.  We, who were required to read it, called it Moby’s Dick, for no other reason than ribaldry made us feel a little less beleaguered by the grim oppression that made us labor through it.  Most of my college books are gone, but I kept it as one would the trophy of an animal one had overcome with perseverance and courage.

I reread the book in my middle age, finding that maturity brought light to its pages that I hadn’t seen before, and that an expanded understanding of the world and a better vocabulary made it a pleasanter read.  Then, while wandering the aisles of the Brattle Book Shop, I came upon an Easton Press edition beautifully bound in black leather and offered at a tempting price.  As happens to book lovers in such a place, I found I couldn’t leave it behind.

I withdrew the Modern Library copy from the shelf, intending to consign it to one of the boxes of books slated for sale at the Antiquarian Society fair next summer, but I found I couldn’t part with the Rockwell Kent illustrations that are far superior to those in my new copy. So now I have two.

The newer acquisition has other charms. The paper is fine and edged with gold that matches the design on the cover.  The endpapers are blue silk, as is the ribbon that keeps my place. The print is beautiful and stands in sharp definition, making it a joy to read, and reading it I am.  

The orbit of the world has passed the vernal equinox, and the weather at its best reminds me of Wormtongue’s description of Éowyn in The Two Towers, “Like a morning of pale spring, still clinging to winter's chill.” Tonight it is snowing, and I am cozy with Moby Dick. I have just passed chapter 49, the first paragraph of which reads:

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.”

I was “Interested” in existentialism in college, but I slogged through that paragraph not noticing how it presaged the philosophy that was then the fad.  Even in the second reading I failed to appreciate its humor and beauty.  On this snowy spring night I finally got it.