Why Read Moby-Dick

mastheads find themselves passing each other silently in the sky: “Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.”
    Good poetry also directs our attention to the most ordinary of human experiences. I know that I cannot go to bed on a cold winter night without thinking of Ishmael’s lyrical aside in chapter 11, “Nightgown,” about the benefits of sleeping in an unheated room. Not only does he provide some very practical advice; he delivers a kind of poetics of physical sensation that culminates in a quietly stunning prose haiku. “[T]o enjoy bodily warmth,” Ishmael explains, “some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if... the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
    In chapter 60, “The Line,” Ishmael’s poetry takes something as prosaic as a piece of rope and turns it into a continuously evolving metaphor of the human condition. He begins with the differences between the two kinds of lines (“Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold”), then describes how the line crisscrosses the whaleboat in “complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it . . . in its perilous contortions,” which leads to a description of what happens when the whale is harpooned and the line darts out (“like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you”) and then to the final revelation: “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”
    In chapter 85, “The Fountain,” Ishmael’s description of a whale’s spout causes him to launch into a riff about the figurative steam that sometimes emanates from his own skull, what he calls “a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head . . . while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic.” In this instance, the image leads to a philosophical breakthrough in which Ishmael hits upon the attitude with which all of us should confront this conundrum called life: “[R]ainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray.... Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” A generous agnostic, Ishmael is also a witty and profound poet for whom enlightenment comes from the improvisational magic of words.

16
    Sharks
    D arkness has fallen by the time the second mate Stubb’s freshly killed whale is secured to the side of the Pequod . Even though it is already quite late, Stubb decides he wants a whale steak for supper. He rouses the ship’s black cook, Fleece, from his hammock and orders him to prepare the bloody hunk of whale meat. As Stubb mercilessly harasses the old man about how to cook the steak, hordes of hungry sharks enjoy a meal of their own in the dark waters below: “[T]hou-sands on thousands of