Why Read Moby-Dick

adolescent, particularly in this age of digital distractions. I know that as a high school senior in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1974, I had expected to be bored to death by the book. But then came that three-word first sentence—“Call me Ishmael”—and I was hooked.
    But I had my own reasons for almost instantly falling in love with Moby-Dick . On the first page, Ishmael describes the city of New York on a Sunday afternoon, its cooped-up inhabitants lingering on the waterfront, looking out longingly toward the sea in search of the “ungraspable phantom of life.” For me, a city kid who had developed an unlikely infatuation with sailing, this scene spoke with a direct, almost overwhelming power. Many of my classmates, however, did not share my enthusiasm, and looking back, I can hardly blame them.
    But the novel, like all great works of art, grows on you. Instead of being a page-turner, the book is a repository not only of American history and culture but also of the essentials of Western literature. It has a voice that is one of the most nuanced in all of literature: at once confiding, funny, and oracular—an outpouring of irrepressible eloquence that soars into the stratosphere even as it remains rooted to the ground. The book is so encyclopedic and detailed that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the middle of the nineteenth century.
    In the more than 150 years since the novel’s publication, we have become those space aliens, the inhabitants of a planet so altered by our profligate presence that we are living on a different Earth from the one Melville knew. And yet the more our world changes, the more relevant the novel seems to be. If Moby-Dick should, like so many works of literature, fall by the wayside, we will have lost the one book that deserves to be called our American bible. As individuals trying to find our way through the darkness, as citizens of a nation trying to live up to the ideals set forth in our constitution, we need, more than ever before, Moby-Dick .
    I am not one of those purists who insist on reading the entire untruncated text at all costs. Moby-Dick is a long book, and time is short. Even a sentence, a mere phrase, will do. The important thing is to spend some time with the novel, to listen as you read, to feel the prose adapt to the various voices that flowed through Melville during the book’s composition like intermittent ghosts with something urgent and essential to say.
    What follows is my idiosyncratic answer to the question that serves as this little book’s title. As a resident of Nantucket Island, the holy ground of Moby-Dick, and the author of a book about the real-life nautical disaster that inspired the conclusion of the novel, I have my own prejudices and point of view. Perhaps because my parents named me for the author who served as Melville’s muse, Nathaniel Hawthorne, I am as intrigued by the events that made possible the book’s composition as I am by the book itself. I am also interested in how the novel continued to haunt Melville in the months and years after its publication. Most of all, however, I am interested in getting you—yes, you —to read, whether it be for the first time or the twelfth time, Moby-Dick .

2
    Landlessness
    I n January 1841, Herman Melville shipped out on the Acush - net from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, just across the river from the whaling port of New Bedford. His father, a well-liked but ineffectual merchant, had died when Herman was twelve, plunging the family into humiliating poverty. In the eight years since, everything Melville tried, from working as a clerk at a law firm to teaching school to making his fortune in what was then the American wilderness of Illinois and Missouri, had failed. With the economy sunk in depression and with no job prospects, Melville did what the narrator, Ishmael, decides to do at the beginning of Moby-Dick; he went to sea.
    Almost as soon as the Acushnet set sail, Melville began to hear stories about the Essex, a Nantucket whaleship that had been sunk more than two decades before by an infuriated sperm whale about a thousand miles west of the Galápagos Islands. Seven months after departing from Fairhaven, the Acushnet was approaching the very latitude in the South Pacific on which the Essex had gone down when the lookout sighted another whaleship. It turned out to be the Lima from