*This was a short talk I gave at an Austin event called "Third Thursday."
Step aboard as we chart a course through the soul of America with Herman Melville's leviathan of literature, "Moby Dick." Grapple with the whale of all novels as we dissect the Essex tragedy's influence on Melville's masterwork, teasing out the human tendency to become what we fear most. Embark with me on a deep exploration of Melville's own odyssey – from exotic encounters with cannibals to his profound insights into the depths of the human condition. As we sift through the thematic currents of meaning, the eternal struggle of man versus nature, and the moral complexities of Melville's era, we'll uncover the resonances within our contemporary societal voyage.
Hold fast as we join the ranks of a virtual literary club, where the passion for prose thrives and Melville's epic reigns supreme. Together, we'll unravel the narrative genius of "Moby Dick," from its labyrinthine structure to the profound impact of Nathaniel Hawthorne on Melville's craft. Witness the immortalization of characters like Ahab, as we celebrate the literary legacy that Melville has etched into the annals of American letters. Also, clear your schedules for an illuminating evening with Luke Travers, whose upcoming talk marries epistemology with the art of interpretation, promising epiphanies as profound as the depths plied by Melville himself.
*This was a short talk I gave at an Austin event called "Third Thursday."
Step aboard as we chart a course through the soul of America with Herman Melville's leviathan of literature, "Moby Dick." Grapple with the whale of all novels as we dissect the Essex tragedy's influence on Melville's masterwork, teasing out the human tendency to become what we fear most. Embark with me on a deep exploration of Melville's own odyssey – from exotic encounters with cannibals to his profound insights into the depths of the human condition. As we sift through the thematic currents of meaning, the eternal struggle of man versus nature, and the moral complexities of Melville's era, we'll uncover the resonances within our contemporary societal voyage.
Hold fast as we join the ranks of a virtual literary club, where the passion for prose thrives and Melville's epic reigns supreme. Together, we'll unravel the narrative genius of "Moby Dick," from its labyrinthine structure to the profound impact of Nathaniel Hawthorne on Melville's craft. Witness the immortalization of characters like Ahab, as we celebrate the literary legacy that Melville has etched into the annals of American letters. Also, clear your schedules for an illuminating evening with Luke Travers, whose upcoming talk marries epistemology with the art of interpretation, promising epiphanies as profound as the depths plied by Melville himself.
Okay. So thank you guys, everybody for coming. I know it's been a weird couple of days and it's winter and a lot of people on vacation, and we didn't know yeah, we didn't know that this freak beautiful day would happen, but it worked out well, although I hear there's a cold front coming in a few minutes, so we'll see what happens. We have no heat warmers, so we'll see how we're doing as usual. So there are hamburgers. I just talked to them. They're on their way, as usual. This cost me this time about 160 bucks, so anything tips-wise would be much appreciated, even if you don't eat the food, because it still costs money to get this place. But today I'm going to be talking to you about Moby Dick and my goal is actually this is Moby Dick, this is a picture book of Moby Dick, and my goal is actually to see if I can convince you to read it or reread it. And just out of curiosity, who has read Moby Dick? Three people, three people, why? No, tora has read it. He said, or kind of okay, wow, three people, not even in high school, anything like that interesting. Okay, so I'm gonna tell you a little story.
Speaker 1:On November 1820, the American whaling ship the Essex was rammed by a sperm whale, causing it to sink. Most people know that the Essex is the origin or one of the inspirations for Moby Dick, but there's more to this story. As their ship was sinking, the crew of the Essex boarded their little boats and set out for land Before them. They had two choices. One choice was to move toward, to put their boats on a path toward an island not that far away that they knew to be full of cannibals. The other choice was to go over 3,000 miles of open sea to, hopefully, civilization, civilized port. They chose the sea and those civilized ports, in other words, not the cannibal island that was nearby. Over 100 days later they were found. Eight out of the original 20 survivors were still alive. One report of these men states that one survivor clutched to his chest a human shin bone. In other words, as they fled cannibal island, they themselves became cannibals.
Speaker 1:Now I think there's a lesson in there for all of us, and I think Herman Melville got a lesson out of that as well. By not facing head on our own ignorances and fears, we become that which we fear most. I believe all of us do this a little bit. We avoid facing truth about maybe let's say a bad relationship out of fear, and thus we create a bad relationship Out of fear caused by ignorance. We avoid to spend time or get to know certain people, places, events, jobs, relationships, and thus become the ignorant, fearful person we assume those people to be. In fact, for the crew in fact they know this for the crew of the Essex, the island of cannibals was their salvation. That's where they would have survived.
Speaker 1:We sometimes run from that which can be the very thing we most desperately need, and end up drifting on an endless ocean, only to become the worst version of ourselves. I've seen, too many times to count, someone run from a great relationship out of fear and end up in that endless ocean, only to regret it later in life. In other words, our fears and ignorances cause us to become cannibals. Metaphorically, we cannibalize ourselves and sometimes those around us, to quote from Moby Dick. Now, american adventurer, sailor, merchant man, whaler and author, herman Melville heard the story of the Essex and he attempted to learn from that story Rather than avoid it. He wanted to learn it when he had the choice. So he was actually a sailor and a merchant man and a whaling man. He was a harpooner and his youth, when he actually had the same exact choice as the Essex men, he chose to live among the cannibals. He actually lived among the cannibals, and this actually leads to one of my favorite quotes in Moby Dick, which is spoken by the fascinating narrator Ishmael, when he says it is better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian, and I love that line.
Speaker 1:The first and probably most important reason to read Moby Dick is this exploration of universal human themes that are throughout this story, such as the quest for meaning, meaning in life, the nature of obsession, conflict between will and fate, struggle between man and nature, the role of friends, companionship, marriage in our lives, leadership, democracy and so much more. Quoting Moby Dick again To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it, and so he wrote it on a whale. Moby Dick was published in 1851. It was a major flop, huge flop For context Melville, his first and biggest book. Biggest success was a novel called Type E, and Type E was based on his exploration of the cannibals and his time with the cannibals. And that novel, just for context, sold 16,000 copies in its first weekend. This is 1840s. That was a big deal. Moby Dick sold 3,000 copies throughout his entire life, so this was a major flop. It was not until the existential and spiritual crisis of World War I that critics began to see the value in Moby Dick. It is a futuristic novel written in 1851. From there it would become a monolith of American and even world literature. Now, despite its initial failure, it is a novel that captures accurately the soul of the American character and the crisis at its core.
Speaker 1:One year prior to the publication of Moby Dick, america passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. For the first time, the northern states of the United States of America were forced to contend with the problem of slavery. Prior to this, the Northerners could often say oh, that slavery thing is a southern problem. A man by the name of Lemuel Shaw was the Supreme Court judge of Massachusetts at this time. He hated slavery. He was an abolitionist, but he loved America as a land of laws, not men. Now he was the first judge to preside on a case of an escaped slave who had fled a plantation, got all the way to Boston, made it to Boston, was captured, brought before the judge, and Judge Shaw ruled in favor of the law. In other words, this abolitionist took a slave and brought him back to his master. He chose the external law to his internal conscience. There were riots and he was burned in effigy. Lemuel Shaw was Herman Melville's father-in-law.
Speaker 1:At the core of this novel is a grappling with both the promise of America and its great failures. The American experiment was alive and flourishing in 1851. The steamboat was opening new regions of land, the railroads was connecting the land from sea to shining sea. 1848 brought the California gold rush. America was preeminent in the production of the prime energy source of that era whale oil. It seemed everyone was making money and getting richer. The promise that America would be great seemed fulfilled, except some men were slaves to others.
Speaker 1:In Moby Dick, ishmael's journey from Nantucket to the Pequod, which is Captain Ahab's ship, serves as a microcosm of America itself. The Pequod's diverse crew, including Quiquewag of Cannibal. Who has heard of Quiquewag, by the way? Anybody heard the name Quiquewag, just a few. Ok, one of the more famous characters in the story. Quiquewag, a cannibal from the South Seas. Pip, a young African-American boy, tashteego, a Native American man, dagu, an African, fadala, a Persian, and Starbucks, a Quaker. These represent the melting pots of American society.
Speaker 1:Each character in the story brings unique perspectives and backgrounds, reflecting the varied and sometimes conflicting facets of America and America's identity. Now their collective goal on this ship is to hunt whales for oil under Ahab's obsessive leadership, which mirrors the either united yet troubled spirit of a nation striving for prosperity, sometimes at the cost of moral and ethical dilemmas such as slavery. The tension between Ahab's monomaniacal quest and Starbucks' voice of reason highlights this internal conflict that defines the American experience. There on the island of Nantucket and then aboard the Piquad, Herman Melville is able to capture the American character and the conflict at that core. This is the promise. What I'm trying to get at here is of something grand, a promise of something grand. You come here for a better life while evading certain spiritual necessities and schisms within the culture.
Speaker 1:Americans in 1776 decided to shuck off the yoke of their country over just a few taxes, to pursue an ideal world in which all men are created equal, while maintaining a system of slavery. Americans set out to tame a savage land, only to sometimes become savages themselves. Americans set out on the grand adventure of war in World War I, only to discover there was no point to it but death. Americans set out to destroy evil in World War II, only to ally with another evil communism. Jfk inspired a nation to be the guardians and the policemen of the wrongs in the world, thus leading to America's involvement in Vietnam, a war fought for both the wrong ends and the wrong means. Americans set out on Operation Iraqi Freedom to provide the value of freedom to a people who did not want it or understand it, thus sacrificing the freedom of both the Iraqis and the Americans.
Speaker 1:This core conflict appears time and again in our society and Melville, I think, captures it better than almost anyone before. I ran Now. This is my second reason. Moby Dick shows us America then and now. To face this is, I think, to face ourselves as Americans on some level. Now, I think it's unfortunate that this book has the reputation that it does this, and I've talked to people about this all the time. But I think the reputation often causes people to turn away from it before they ever attempt to actually read it or, worse, having read it in their youth, forever writing it off as a grand epic and too digressive or confusing. All grand things are confusing at first, I think. Thank you. It takes examination, it takes reflection and time to understand anything grand. This is one of those books that it's worth the time. I believe it's a transformative book for anybody who reads it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I'm gonna end by reading you a passage and you guys have been so patient and I'm gonna ask for your patience one more time because it's a confusing passage but I want you to get a sense of the language, because this is the third reason. I'm not gonna go into any more other than the reading of it itself. But this is another really big reason to read this book. I think it's been called a prose epic and I think there's some truth to that. There's some really fascinating ways that he uses language and the passage I'm going to be reading. One of the things that I love about it is you can read it, I think, every year and get some new things out of it. It just has a depth to it that's very similar to poetry.
Speaker 1:Now I'm gonna read from the paragraph or the last paragraph of the chapter called the whiteness of the whale. It's a very famous chapter. He goes into all kinds of thoughts and ideas about the science and the culture and what is whiteness. What is white as absence or presence of all all kinds of a whole eight or nine pages just on what is whiteness and why is the white? And this is how he ends. Now, again, I'm gonna ask for your patience because I think there's a lot of confusing things. It's gonna be hard, but I hope what it will do is you hear a couple pretty phrases, something that might pique your interest, so you'll want to go back and dive into this epic prose story. So here we go, last paragraph.
Speaker 1:It is that by its indefiniteness, or, excuse me, is it that by its indefiniteness, it shadows forth the heartless voids in immensities of the universe and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way? Or is it that, as in essence, whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color and, at the same time, the concrete of all colors? Is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness full of meaning in a wide landscape of snows, a colorless, all color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues, every stately or lovely emblazoning, the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods yay, and the gilded velvets of butterflies and the butterfly cheeks of young girls, all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances but only laid on from without, so that all deified nature absolutely paints like the harlot, so that whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel house within. And when we proceed further and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, forever remains white or colorless in itself.
Speaker 1:And if operating without medium upon matter which touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge, pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us, a leper. And like willful travelers in Lapland who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things, the albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye, then, at the fiery hunt, anybody get anything out of that. I just had a curiosity. You saw what you see the whale, okay. So I'm imploring you to not act as the men of the Essex, turning away from this great book out of fear caused by an ignorance. Rather, swim toward the land of knowledge and wisdom. Stretch yourself up, grab onto the hull of the ship and climb aboard. Thank you, I love it, that's it. Oh, nice, now, if you have.
Speaker 1:I didn't know if this would actually answer any questions, but oh, yeah, yes, so if anybody would like to join, thank you for that. So January 28th we're starting Moby Dick. We have, I think, 12 or 13 people signed up, but it's going to be over four months, so all you have to read by 28th is the first three chapters and that's it. So one Sunday a month, yeah, so just one setting a month for discussion, I think 1030 AM, but anyway. So yeah, if you'd like to join, let me know you could definitely join. That.
Speaker 1:It's part of the literary canon club that I have done for a while. This 90 minutes, yeah, so it's online 90 minutes with people all over the country and it's people that I've done this for about a year and a half to more like two years now. So we've had a group of this for a while. So what do you mean? You actually read it before and comfortable, yeah, we. So the literary canon club is basically. It's a community in a discussion, in a live discussion group, with aids to help keep you motivated.
Speaker 1:My pitch to people is if you've ever picked up a great book and put it down without finishing it. This is the book club for you. Will help keep you on track, will help get you going. So there's there's weekly readings on what you should be reading to stay on track. There's motivation. We try to keep each other accountable, but the idea is to get through some of these books but not kill ourselves doing it, not doing it like a week or two.
Speaker 1:This is again over four months, I think. It's 6700 pages, adds up to about 45 pages a week, something like that. So something definitely doable for even a busy professional. So on zoom, yeah, it's live. On zoom, yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:So anything else, any questions? Who's going to read Moby Dick? One, two, okay, but you already planned on doing it. Oh, not, not you, marty, but okay, yes, okay, I did that something. No, no, no, no. So I mean I have, I have, I wanted you to that.
Speaker 1:So that is the end of one of the more philosophical sections. There are amazing characters. There are amazing moments. For instance, you're going to find moments if you read it. There's, he's going to teach you about Wales. He has a whole section on cytology that he's trying, he's, but he's actually doing something very interesting. You know people talk about his digressions, but I think there's something real in his. He's trying to accomplish something with his digressions. They're not as random as I thought when I first read it, like there's a point behind all of it and so, but he'll go off on, like you know, like as a cytology, the history of whaling, how a boat works, how you know what the seamen are doing here's.
Speaker 1:Here's another small quote. You mind, if I read something that's slightly different, this one, I think this is the right one. Yeah, so this, this one is called Cistern in buckets. Now, this whole this, so it's a chapter about Cistern in buckets random, but it's about actually in detail, the process of excavating the oil, the sperm, a settee from the head of the whale, and they would like he would describe the cutting of the whale, the getting in there with buckets and just hauling this stuff out of there, and A character Tastigo the Native American, falls in to this hat Actually, and here's a quote Now, had Tastigo perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing, smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti, coffined hearst and tuned in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled the delicious death of an Ohio honey hunter who's seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such an exceeding store of it that, leaning too far over it, sucked him in so that he died embalmed. How many think ye have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head and sweetly perished there? He does that stuff all the time. Sometimes he'll just be straight. He has literally sections that are almost like encyclopedia on whales. It ranges the spectrum of how he writes. A lot of people criticize that and I get it. But in the second reading I'm seeing that there is a purpose behind all of it, anything else.
Speaker 1:Thank you guys for your questions. I hope you guys read that. Okay, nothing else. I'm going to make one announcement. I have one more question. Oh, please ask all the questions.
Speaker 1:Are you born in Melville in America? Yeah, he was born. I don't remember where he was born Massachusetts I believe. But yeah, 18, 19, born in America Again. When he was nine his father lost all their money or he died and they lost the family money. He was actually from a well-to-do family and he had a really good education up until about the age of 11, and then he was out in the system, whatever they did back then.
Speaker 1:When he was 19, he went on a merchant ship and became a sailor. He did that for about seven or eight years, traveling all over the world. He participated in the mutiny, he lived with the cannibals and then he came back and started writing books, the first one being Type E, which was about his sailing adventures and was a big success. Then he wrote another book, omo, I believe it's called and then he wrote Moby Dick, which was actually just about one of his sailing adventures. It was just a straight-wailing story, nothing crazy and all the stuff that's in there. The character Ahab was not in that original story, but then he met a man by the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne helped him see that one of his great strengths as a writer was his ability to look at the blackness, the darkness of life and write honestly about it without being sucked into it. He created characters like Ahab and he added all this depth to the story of Moby Dick. It became an enduring classic.
Speaker 1:He did write after that. He wrote some novels. I've read a lot of his short stories he wrote after that. When he died it was found a copy of Billy Budd, which is probably his other famous story. It's a novella called Billy Budd. My favorite is actually Benito Serrino, but he also wrote the Scrivener, which a lot of people probably read that in high school Don't even remember it.
Speaker 1:That's a guy who says whenever his boss asks him to do something, he says perhaps I would not like to do that or something like that, or perhaps not. It's like he's a broken record type thing. Yeah, he did write, but never really made success in writing. He's worked around a lot. Anything else? Okay. So thank you, guys, and here's the announcement.
Speaker 1:So next month we're going to have Luke Travers coming back to Austin. He's going to do a talk, and I forget what his talk's about, but it's going to be about basically how epistemology having a good epistemology helps you in interpreting art. So I think it'll be a really interesting one. This is one that he's done before. He's also going to do a tour in Blanton and then he's going to do a couple tours up in Houston. So I don't remember the exact date. I think it's around the 18th of February, but the third Thursday. So he's coming for that. He'll be there that whole weekend. If you have not done a Luke Travers tour. I would highly recommend you try it, even if it means going up to Houston, it's definitely definitely worthwhile. Okay, so thank you everybody for sticking around and checking this out. I hope you read We'll be there, Thank you.