Why Read Moby-Dick

pulpit-like table slicing the blubber into bible leaves. It’s then that Ishmael delivers the punch line. “[W]hat a candidate for an archbishoprick,” he enthuses, “what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!”

20
    The Left Wing
    W hen I was growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1960s, we would sometimes drive into the city past the steel mills along the Monongahela River. The stench and smoke were so bad that my younger brother and I would hold our breath as we looked in fascination at those scorched towers belching fire. Twenty or so years later, when I moved to Nantucket and became interested in the island’s whaling past, I came to realize that Nantucket in the early nineteenth century, when the town was the center of America’s first global industry, was much more like the Pittsburgh of my childhood than the posh summer resort it had become. Back in the nineteenth century, Nantucket stank of oil, and in 1846, when a fire broke out at a hat store on Main Street, close to half the town was consumed by flames fed by the very element that had sustained the island for more than a hundred years. Nantucket rebuilt, this time in brick, but for all intents and purposes whaling was finished. Within a couple of decades the island’s population had dropped from ten thousand to just three thousand. Nantucket was on its way to becoming a ghost town, just as my old home Pittsburgh has been abandoned by a sizable segment of its population since it, too, lost the industry that once made it famous. It’s what happens to communities, large or small, afloat or ashore, that play with fire.
    To kindle a fire on an oil-soaked wooden ship was risky at best, but it was the only way to boil the blubber into oil. Wood was used to start the fire in the brick tryworks, but once the rendering of the blubber had begun, the flames were fed with the crispy bits that floated to the top of the bubbling try-pots. This meant that the fire that consumed the whale was fed with pieces of the whale’s own body. The smoke that poured forth from this organically fueled flame smelled even worse than the fumes from burned human hair. According to Ishmael, “It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.”
    This horrible smoke wafts across the deck as Ishmael stands at the Pequod ’s helm on a dark and breezy night. “[T]he wild ocean darkness was intense,” he recounts. “But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.... [T]he rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.” Ishmael is taken over by a “stark, bewildered feeling, as of death” as he attempts to steer the Pequod through her self-created fog. Suddenly he discovers that he has somehow managed to turn himself around so that he is now facing the stern instead of the bow. This means that any turn of the helm will be the opposite of what he intends and could very well capsize the ship. Ishmael quickly corrects himself. “How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night,” he says.
    There is a lesson in all of this. “Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me,” Ishmael advises. “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” What is needed more than anything else in the midst of a crisis is a calm, steadying dose of clarity, the kind of omniscient, all-seeing perspective symbolized by an eagle on the wing: “And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.” Here Melville provides a description of the ideal leader, the anti-Ahab who instead of anger and pain relies