Moby-Dick or, The Whale (1851)
Herman Melville
For
the first time in my life I’m at a loss for words, unsure, for once, of what exactly
my fumbling little pretensions could add to anything. Moby-Dick is arguably the greatest novel of all time and I hadn’t
read it until just now, which makes me feel as though I’ve been wasting my time
as a booklover. As if reading anything else has merely been dicking around.
This book is usually assigned in high school but it wasn’t assigned to me for
some reason. My class read something different. The Scarlet Letter, maybe.
Probably the first and third period senior English classes got Moby-Dick and the second and fourth
period classes got I don’t know, Pride
and Prejudice or some other nonsense. Whatever it was I’m sure I hated it.
What a rip-off. My teachers could have been inducting me into the mystery cults
of knowledge and misanthropy and struggle and freedom and death and ART but
instead they helped me waste my youth by boring me to tears with stories about
the privileged and their insipid feelings. I almost feel like it’s too late for
me now, like this book could have and should have come to me at a young age
like a meteorite from the dark cosmos landing aflame in my lap but now I’m too
old and too calloused to really appreciate or understand it. Took me a long
time to get through it, too, and if anyone cares I’m sorry about that. Mr.
Melville is not at fault here: I was harpooned from the first sentence. Rather I’m
a very slow reader and at my ten page per day pace a 630 page book is
practically Mt. Everest.
