Why Read Moby-Dick

on equanimity and judgment, who does his best to remain above the fray, and who even in the darkest of possible moments resists the “woe that is madness.”
    As I have said before, Moby-Dick is a book that was written for the future. In this portrait of a person who resists the fiery, disorienting passions of the moment, who has the soul of a high-flying Catskill eagle, Melville, in his preternatural way, has hit upon a description of the political figure America desperately needed in 1851 but who would not appear on the national stage until almost a decade later, when Abraham Lincoln became president of the United States.

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    So Remorseless a Havoc
    I n chapter 105, Melville tackles a prescient question given today’s extinction-prone Earth: “whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must . . . , like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.” In the paragraphs that follow, Ishmael compares the whale to the buffalo in the American West and acknowledges that given what has happened to those “humped herds,” it might seem inevitable that “the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.”
    But after examining the question from a variety of angles, he decides that this is not the case. First off, whales have a much larger habitat than the buffalo—larger, in fact, than all the earth’s landmasses combined. Second, sperm whales have the ability to retreat to “their Polar citadels” in the icy north and south, where they can “bid defiance to all pursuit from man.” As a consequence, the whale is, Ishmael insists, “immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality.”
    For those of us who grew up in the aftermath of the industrialized slaughter of whales in the 1950s and 1960s, when it looked as if several species of cetaceans would indeed go the way of the buffalo, Ishmael might seem woefully naive, especially since the world’s ice sheet has so dramatically diminished in recent years. On the other hand, the sperm whale population is now on the rebound even as evidence continues to mount that our addiction to what replaced whale oil—petroleum—has contributed to global warming and sea-level rise. In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity. Maybe Ishmael’s reference to “the last man” is more than a figure of speech. Instead of whales, maybe the endangered megafauna is us.
    â€œIn Noah’s flood [the whale] despised Noah’s Ark,” Ishmael reminds us, “and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.” There it is, Ishmael’s vision of the future: a drowned world devoid of land dwellers, a paradise for whales.

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    Queequeg
    I n Typee, the bestseller Melville wrote about his time with the native peoples of the Marquesas, the narrator is at first enraptured with his hosts, in particular the beautiful Fayaway. But then something strange happens. His leg begins to bother him to the point that he can no longer walk. He soon realizes that he must leave this island paradise; otherwise he is going to rot to death like an old banana. “Try to go back to the savages,” the novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote in an essay about Melville, “and you feel as if your very soul was decomposing inside you.” So what happens when the roles are reversed; what happens when the native flees his island paradise for a whaleship?
    Queequeg was born on a Pacific island but decided that he had to leave. Like Melville, he fled his former home for the strangeness of the other. After his years as a whaleman, he is no longer strictly a native, but he is far from being your ordinary Westerner. He is, Ishmael tells us, “a creature in the transition state—neither caterpillar nor butterfly.” And then, after several sweltering days cleaning out the Pequod ’s hold, this tattooed exotic from the South Seas gets sick and, like the narrator in Typee, begins to die.
    As his body wastes away, his eyes become increasingly prominent. “[L]ike circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his