Why Read Moby-Dick

ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.” This is not the sea of the “Nantucket” chapter. This is the godless sea of the Essex disaster. “No mercy, no power but its own controls it . . . ,” Ishmael continues; “the masterless ocean overruns the globe . . . the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.”
    Given the dangers of the ocean, the wisest thing for a man or woman to do is to steer for the same Polynesian islands that the Essex men so feared and to remain there at all costs. “For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
    Ishmael’s “insular Tahiti” is the South Seas equivalent of a 1960s-style fallout shelter; both are hideouts from “the horrors of the half known life,” radioactive or wet. The United States in the 1850s must have felt much as it did during the cold war. In both eras, citizens lived with the conviction that a catastrophe was imminent. America dodged the nuclear bullet in the 1960s, but the twenty-first century feels more and more like an era in which a cataclysm, whether financial, environmental, or terrorist devised, is just around the corner. In the end, we are still at the mercy of the sea.

12
    Is There a Heaven?
    T o love and work and be happy in this life is to refrain from focusing on what awaits us and everyone we care about: decay and death, at least in this world. The curse of being human is to realize that it all ends and can do so at any moment. To acknowledge and internalize this truth in an unmediated way is to go, like Ahab, insane.
    Some people don’t think about death very much, if at all. Since there’s nothing they can do about it, why worry about it? Not Melville. Judging from his letters to Hawthorne and his writings throughout his life, he thought about it all the time. The belief that death was the end, that we are utterly and truly annihilated when we die, was not something he could easily accept. He desperately needed to know there is a heaven.
    In the beginning of the book, Ishmael is confident that eternity will be waiting for him no matter what happens down here on Earth. He may be crushed by a whale, but not even God can stave his immortal soul. Even before the Pequod sets sail, however, he has begun to wonder whether this is entirely true. It becomes an obsessive theme of Moby-Dick: Is there a heaven?
    At one point Ishmael jokingly tells us how he proposes to settle the question once and for all with the help of a whale: “With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces [bundles] of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!”
    Later in the book, in his description of the ship’s carpenter, who is called upon to manufacture Ahab’s new whalebone leg, Melville provides a haunting portrayal of a world bereft of heaven. The carpenter is an existential nullity without a spark of intelligence or human warmth; he merely exists. He personifies a world without God. His “impersonal stolidity . . . seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world,” Ishmael tells us, “involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness . . . ; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next . . . ; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers.”
    Ahab is infuriated by his dependence on the carpenter. “Here I am,” he agonizingly soliloquizes, “proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on!” He may strive to transcend all that is mundane and bestial, but in the end Ahab is a one-legged old man who requires the help of others.
    So it was for Melville, an author with unquenchable ambition, but who depended on mere mortals to