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Why You Should ONLY Read the First 3 Chapters of Moby-Dick

• Kirk j Barbera

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Imagine setting sail on a voyage where the depths of the American soul are as vast and mysterious as the ocean itself. Our latest episode traverses the enduring waves of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick," through a lens that magnifies the novel's relevance to our contemporary lives. We promise a literary escapade that reveals how Ishmael's narrative resonates with our own yearnings for purpose and connection in an era of rapid societal transformation. 

Feel the pulse of today's workforce as we discuss the striking parallels between the disconnection Ishmael felt aboard the Pequod and the sense of detachment permeating modern employment. The conversation sails through the industrial age's impact on the human spirit and anchors in the present-day longing for adventure within the confines of our structured lives. This quest for meaning and unity with the cosmos is more than just a tale of the sea; it's a journey into the heart of what it means to be alive in a world of constant change.

As the tides of history ebb and flow, so does the American consciousness, with the shadow of societal issues looming as large as the legendary whale itself. Join us as we navigate the moral quandaries faced by historical figures like Melville's father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, against the backdrop of a nation on the brink of the Civil War. With a thoughtful reflection on life's meaning amidst personal and global events, we examine whether destiny plays a part in the chaos of existence or if the search for meaning is a quest as eternal as the sea.

Speaker 1:

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Today, I want to try to convince you not to read the entirety of this book, but to just read the first three chapters, because I believe that Moby Dick, herman Melville, the author, he will be much better at convincing you to finish and continue with the journey. Moby Dick is a book about America in the 19th century and it's about the American mind today. What I want to talk about today, on Troubadour Talks with you, is the idea of the main character, ishmael, and the modern man, that there's something special, unique, that Herman Melville is capturing with the way that he's trying to convey his message to you today, in 2024. I'm recording this March of 2024. To begin, I want to start with a quote that comes from the very first paragraph.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to actually do some of the job that I'm asking you to do, which is read the first three chapters. I'm going to do some of it for you. I want you to think about. Have you ever felt this? Have you ever felt what I'm about to read to you? Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet, and especially whenever my hippos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off, then I account it high time to get to see as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish, kato throws himself upon his sword. I quietly take to the ship. So I want to convince you to just continue and read a couple more paragraphs, a couple more chapters into Moby Dick, and I hope you'll continue your journey into the heart of this classic. I'll create other videos on channel Troubeter Channel and I hope you will follow, like, subscribe for this and other content that I create. But for now I want to try to go into and dig a little bit into this book and, with the assumption that you haven't heard or read it, or even if you had, maybe I can help you get a little bit more out of it.

Speaker 1:

Moby Dick is a book of deep meditative power, one that has inspired countless of hours of contemplation, reflection and thoughts on topics such as the meaning of life, purpose of work, religious values, the other democracy, america, capitalism, environmentalism, industry, leadership, love, sex and sexuality and marriage, friendship, seamanship, history, philosophy, epistemology and, of course, wales. After having finished Moby Dick, one can quite literally pick up this book, flip to a random passage and be blown away by all that's packed into a few lines. A lot like poetry, actually. And this goes to a core aspect of the book Moby Dick, because it is often categorized as a novel, which I think sets your expectations for something, something that's not fully accurate in a depiction of what this is, because it isn't really a novel. As the literary critic Harold Bloom said, it is more of a prose epic, like the Iliad or Dante's. It has more of the meditative, contemplative style of poetry than of prose. Now it is written in prose, meaning paragraphs of full, complete sentences, not verse, not rhyme. It is prose, it is the way you know the things you read on a more regular basis, but it has the power of poetry.

Speaker 1:

But I'm warning you this because do not enter the world of Moby Dick with the expectation of a basic plot, of a series of events about a man at sea and a monomaniacal captain obsessed with a revenge upon a fish. Rather dive into this book with the expectation that you will be forever altered by the journey, much like our narrator, ishmael, is forever altered by his journey on the Pequod that's the ship that they go out on, and with his captain, captain Ahab. It is a tragic, weird, strange, bizarre, bewildering book, and it is a book that will speak to you. I promise you that I do Come back to me if you don't believe me. So I want to set this up. I want you to have a couple of leads on what to think about when you're going through this story, and even the first couple chapters, because it is infinitely relatable to our own era. Any great book should be in a canonical book, in particular, should be universally applicable. But in particular, I think Herman Melville is a great book, or Moby Dick's by Herman Melville is a great book and it's written in a modern era. It has some of the feel of the Homer's the Odyssey, but it has some of the practical problems and emotional problems that we face today.

Speaker 1:

So let me give you a couple of questions and observations that I've had. Maybe you've had some of these observations as well, so you might have heard again. I'm recording this March 2024. You might have heard of the viral TikTok sensation of women asking their men how often do you think of Rome? And this got billions of views women asking this. And it turns out that maybe people were doing this because they were asked by a woman and it was being recorded, so they wanted to say this. But the reality was that a lot of men said yes, I think about it pretty much every day. And this became like a whole viral thing. Do men think of Rome every day? So that's one question why do men think of Rome so often, even if it's not the Haley so often? Why do so many men spend so much time playing video games? And women too, of course, but let's focus, because this is the narrator's a male. I'm going to focus a little bit on the male perspective, but again, I think it's applicable pretty similarly across genders. Why do so many men spend so much time playing video games? Gaming is by far the largest sector in the entertainment and media industry today, by far so another.

Speaker 1:

Here's an observation I've had we experience a disconnection from the world. We feel disconnected from our work, from our community, from our families, our country. This feeling of disconnect, of being adrift, of not having a place, seems to dominate people in the West today in particular, there's phenomenons we hear about. You might have heard of the term quiet quitting. This is a broader job dissatisfaction issue that we have in our country and in the West. Quiet quitting, if you haven't heard, is when employees continue to put in the minimum amount of effort to keep their jobs but don't go the extra mile for their employer. That's the broad sense, but it's more. I think the way I understand it, quiet quitting is more something like person will do the minimum they think is necessary to not get fired, and so that might mean some contemplative way of showing up absenteeism, getting away as much as they can, being present, doing certain kind of tasks that they know will please their manager or the other person, and then checking out.

Speaker 1:

And there's a question of why do we have that kind of disconnect with our jobs? And there's a lot of reasons, and what I'm going to be arguing is not that Herman Melville has all the answers and that sociology can help us with nothing, although I think the great literary writers today and of the past are better sociologists than any sociologist, because they are more observers of the human nature on an individual basis. Because that's what it's required to write a novel is you have to write characters, and so you have to have an understanding of an individual human soul, even if you're trying to put him in a broader context, which is what Herman Melville does Now. He does in a very modern way, but we'll talk about that on other videos. So some other observations. I mean I'm sure you've noticed the political and social unrest, the taking sides, left or right, polarization, that this is something you have to do, that these have answers in this realm. You've heard that you have to go into either the left or the right or something on that nature.

Speaker 1:

We have fears around tech displacement. Technology will displace us. We even have fear mongers who are tech giants like Elon Musk, telling us we should be scared of AI, that it's going to destroy us or at the very least, it's going to displace us, which it will displace some of the jobs that we have. Of course it will, but why is there so much fear around that?

Speaker 1:

Now, our narrator, the narrator of Moby Dick, ishmael, felt all these same emotions, in different concrets, of course, in the pre-Civil War era of the United States. This was written in 1851. These feelings were becoming more and more prominent among more and more people in a growing, industrialized and globalized world. So the feelings that we have today are not just 2024 feelings. My argument is that they are feelings that happened and they are prominent in this new kind of globalized, industrialized world. They're relevant there. This was not a relevant thing.

Speaker 1:

These feelings of political unrest I mean the reality of political unrest was very relevant in terms of if you're living in the 11th, 12th century and you have a new lord coming into your area, he might slaughter certain people, and so that's, of course, very relevant to you. But the idea of taking sides and you have to voice your opinion on something is not relevant to peasants, which is what we were for all of human history except for a very small one to five, maybe 10% of the society. Maybe one to five is I'm just making these numbers up but just broadly speaking, one to five percent might be the actual wealthy ruling class. Then you have some merchants under that and then the vast majority of people 90 plus percent are peasants, just working the land. They wake up, they wear the same clothes day in and day out. Sometimes only one or two sets their entire life and that's it. That's life. So this is new to the industrial era and Herman Melville is capturing something that resonates and is still prevalent to us today.

Speaker 1:

So you should ask yourself, if you do decide to read Moby Dick, if you do decide to go into not just the first three chapters, which I hope this video will convince you of, but go into this whole book, you should ask yourself what does Ishmael do in this case? What is his kind of solution? Or does he have a solution? What do you think? How does the epic narrator attempt to heal his soul and find oneness, connection, meaning with the universe, with his life? Do you agree with him or do you disagree? Do you understand what he's trying to do or not? I've got to be kidding. So, do you understand him or not?

Speaker 1:

Now I'd like to talk a little bit about vagabonds and the vagabond life. Now, you may have heard of this term or maybe not, but this is a relevant thing to our culture and to the 19th century culture in a way that it was not. Again, throughout all of history, you had wandering minstrels, you had perhaps a merchant who would do a pilgrimage, but again, for the most part, the majority of people, 90% plus, throughout all of human history and in almost all cultures and throughout all the world. They're not doing this kind of thing, they're not vagabonding, they're not putting their sack on their shoulder with a stick and a sack with all their worldly possessions and kind of going out and just living or trying to live and going from town to town. They'd be working or doing something.

Speaker 1:

The vagabond, the traveler. Life was not a life for the whole of human history until the 19th century, until industrialization, when we finally had an explosion of wealth. So this call to adventure, this feeling of being trapped although peasants were more trapped than anybody, they didn't have the feeling of it, or at least we weren't aware of it, because nobody could read or write and most peasants couldn't read or write. So in 19th century travel among the population exploded. I mean, for the first time in human history we have expansion by the steamship of travel, including transatlantic travel. So you go across an ocean on a steamship. By the 1830s and 1840s, so in the decades right before Moby Dick, steamships began regular transatlantic crossings, making overseas transit more accessible and frequent.

Speaker 1:

There's a concept you might have even heard of called the grand tour. It's mostly a European thing traditionally, but this idea started traveling to America and Americans started to have similar types of desires of having a grand worldly. In particular, they would go to Europe and travel around Europe. This was mostly for wealthy Americans, but it started opening up for more and more people. As the point because that goes to the last thing that happened during the Industrial Revolution, which I've already alluded to, which was the economic growth and middle class travel in particular the economic growth of the United States throughout the 19th century increased disposable income. So what this does is it increases the growing middle class. So that little sliver of. So you have the wealthy. There's more wealthy people than ever but then that little sliver of all those merchants that did exist for a long time, for hundreds and hundreds of years. You have them. Even in ancient Rome. That little sliver exploded from a little sliver to boom. A big chunk of society and a growing chunk of society. So all of a sudden you have people with a little bit of money if they wanna save up and go travel and do something for education, leisure, even health reasons.

Speaker 1:

Now this is something again in the first chapter that Ishmael identifies and thinks about. He says I am tormented with an everlasting itch and itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts. This is a feeling that people had. I don't know if 12th century Pilgrim 12th century, I don't know if the 12th century peasant had the same feeling. If they had that feeling of the itch for something, where does that itch come from? Why do they have that itch? The itch for something remote? The world was opening up and the call to adventure being called out to this was just beginning to capture the attention of the masses. This is me, this is you, this is Ishmael.

Speaker 1:

As you read about Ishmael in these first three chapters, ask yourself, when have you felt the desire to leave everything behind and start fresh? Okay, so I'm gonna tell you a little about myself, if you haven't seen me before. My name is Kirk Barbera, I'm the editor of Troubadour Magazine, I do a podcast, I do the YouTube channel, I do something called the Literary Canon Club, where we read through the literature from Homer to Melville, and I also have a full-time job from in business development, sales, fundraising. I'm 38 years old right now, as of March 2024. And I, for one, have felt this itch for things remote, this being confined and trapped, and I got to get out of here. I got to move, I got to do something else, like I'm not miserable, I'm not happy, things aren't going my way, I don't know what to do. Get me out of here. I got to do something. Forget it. I'm going to just join the military. I'm going to join the police force.

Speaker 1:

These are literally things that I've thought about when I was younger. I'm a little bit, perhaps too old now for those types of adventures, but those are things that I really thought like let me just get out of here. I've thought about wandering around with just my laptop over here and drinking like Hemingway. For me, this desire has been prevalent throughout my whole life and it's why I've moved around the country almost 30 times. I have impulsively purchased an RV to travel in. Right, I've never cycled at 35, having never been on a motorcycle before. I never sat on a motorcycle before this, but I just wanted to travel around. I had this romantic vision of it, and now in my home that I have. I have a nice home right outside of Austin Texas and I feel trapped. I keep looking at Zillow and I think is my house price going up so I could maybe sell and get out of here. I feel that once in a while and I want to talk. So I think I bet you have some things like that as well.

Speaker 1:

And I want to go into another quote by Ishmael that I think captures something about this feeling, something about the feeling of want, the call to adventure. But how he manifested is very interesting. He says, quote now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to see whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes and begin to be overconscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to see as a passenger, for go as a passenger, you must needs have a person. A purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get seasick, grow, grow quarrelsome, don't sleep of nights, do not enjoy themselves much. As a general thing, no, I never go as a passenger. Nor, though I am something of assault, do I ever go to see as a Commodore, a Captain or a cook. I abandoned the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable, respectable toils, trials and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I could do to take care of myself without taking care of ships, bargs, briggs, schooners and whatnot.

Speaker 1:

So we get a little bit more into Ishmael's mood and, of course, the whole book. We get a little bit of his mood. Ishmael's mood, remember, is pistol and ball Guys. That's suicide, that's his mood. He thinks of jumping on a sword like Cato. But he doesn't want to do it like Cato. So Cato was the Roman senator who, at the fall of the Republic, decided that he would rather die than live in the new empire. But instead Ishmael goes to sea. That's his response to this desire of suicide, of death. He does not want the responsibility of running the ship and having men as his subordinates that he must look after, and so he doesn't want to be a passenger on a ship. He decides to go on a whaling ship as a shipmate, as a whaler. This is the 19th century American mind. This is you. You've probably had some kind of similar feelings, maybe not even just American, also just the West in broadly speaking, but I think it's very American. I think there's something uniquely American about this desire that he has to go out and do something.

Speaker 1:

Now in the book, by the way, if you do continue past the three chapters, you will get a lot about what whaling was in the 19th century, how it operated, how they did it very visceral, visual, concrete images of the whole venture into the deep unknown and the slaughter of whales and the digging them out to get the whale oil which is how we lit the world. Before electricity, it was whale oil. Whale oil was dominant throughout. Well, I should say that not before just electricity, before kerosene. So kerosene, which comes from the ground, comes from oil you go out. Now that's kind of the equivalent today is our oil industry is very similar to this in the sense of going out and hunting for this oil You'd still go out and hunt for today. Production and distribution of oil.

Speaker 1:

I brought up some questions earlier about Rome, video games, job dissatisfaction, polarization, tech displacement. I want you to consider an emotion that underlies all of those that I think is prevalent to swine. A lot of those are coming up and I'm not going to, by the way, I'm not going to be giving you full, complete answers because to some degree, this is just about leads, leads toward these deep questions, and literature often does just give you the leads and maybe some thoughts on how to come to conclusions. It's really about you coming to the conclusion. What are you coming to? So consider the feeling looming, l-o-o-m-i-n-g. There's something looming. Looming of what, who knows Something bad. What do we do? What can one do? What can any of us do? I think about video games and jobs and polarization, tech, displacement. We do not have good answers, but we do have the feeling that something is looming on the horizon.

Speaker 1:

Well, lo and behold, chapter One of Moby Dick is called looming. Let's look at this word for a moment, let's examine it, let's tear it apart, let's open it up and see what it's about. So, first off, start with the Oxford English Dictionary. It defines it as a shadowy form, especially one that is large and threatening. So some key terms are large, threatening, shadowy. Well, let's think about how this might apply to some of those questions and observations from earlier.

Speaker 1:

What happened to Rome? It fell. Why do we have obsession with how it fell? Maybe because we live in an American empire, or we feel like we do. We're thinking these signs, that we're seeing the signs of the fall of America. Is it a looming feeling that maybe the end of America is done, maybe it'll be China or Russia or some combination, and the power of America and the American experiment is over? The experiment has been run. There's a looming feeling of that. What about job dissatisfaction? Well, we get the idea of just push some buttons, fill that coin purse why you're supposed to, but who cares really? Do the minimum? Go back to games, go back to thoughts of Rome. What's the work all about anyway? I'm just a grunt worker, maybe checking some code, doing whatever grunt work that doesn't really mean anything to me.

Speaker 1:

This feeling of looming, this feeling of something bad happening in the future, is still prevalent all the time. Our disconnect from work, I think, has the same underlying feeling of I don't know what this is about. There's this hazy kind of feeling going on. We're going to get to a little bit more in a second Tech doom and displacement. I mean, come on, that's simple Tech doom, that's the loom. That's. The thing is, there's something with AI. It's looming over us Political unrest. Well, at least one side tells you some answers to this problem. Again, this undefined feeling. We're not talking about a very clear answer. It's a hazy feeling of something bad going to happen. Of course we can say, if we pick a side, left or right, the other side, the others, those people over there, the left or the right, they are the problem, they're the cause, the cause of what? The cause of the looming? It's a shadowy figure, a thoughtful or not thought out, clearly defined, with all its parameters, designed and understood. It's looming. It's just this haze.

Speaker 1:

Why do men play video games? Well, you can win. There's clear answers. You can go on a journey. You could play one of my favorite games Red Dead Redemption 2, and there's a structure to it. It's the same thing with videos and movies and books and things like that. There's a structure. We could say okay, we're going here, we're going to do this, we're going to kill these people, we're going to try not to die from these people. There's a bank robbery over here. We can be a bad guy, we could be a good guy. A white hat, a back hat. Even if there's some ambiguity sometimes, there's clarity to the plot structure of most games. Also I think I'll just add this as an aside I think there's a feeling of satisfying that itch that I told you about, the itch to go to places remote, the itch to land on Barber's Coast, so you can scratch that itch a little bit and have no real danger. So it's actually kind of dangerous to join the military, even the police force, but to play a video game, you could scratch that itch a little bit and not actually have that.

Speaker 1:

So, to kind of recap some of what we talked about about America in 1851, and how they're experiencing the same kinds of things we're experiencing. So, remember, travel is opening up for the first time, so people have also this call to adventure. The steamship is making it possible to move across the Atlantic to look at new places in the world the 1849 gold rush is one example, but many things about the opening up of wealth, that more and more people are becoming more and more wealthy and Americans are getting richer. And yet in 1851, there is in the American soul some looming, something looming in the background In most Americans. This is some kind of dark, subterranean thing being ignored, a threat to all of this. Now, if you know 1851, well, what happened in 1860? Civil war. So there was something relevant that was nine years away, that I think Melville is actually capturing, the feeling of something looming. And yet we still have that today. So are we nine years away from a civil war? I mean, there's a movie coming out as I'm recording this, called Civil War. I think people use that term all the time and this adds to the looming feeling we have Ishmael. So at the time, by the way, it's slavery and its consequences was the looming thing.

Speaker 1:

Melville was a northerner. He was against slavery. His father-in-law was actually a preeminent judge, lemuel Shaw, who oversaw the first case of returning a runaway slave from the Runaway Slave Act of, I think, 1850, I believe. A runaway slave went to the north to get away from a southern plantation owner, or southern owner, lemuel Shaw, who was anti-slavery in his consciousness, but the law said he had to uphold the law and he was a judge, and so he had a conflict between what he wanted, his soul and the concrete laws of his time. And what did Lemuel Shaw, herman Melville's father-in-law, do? He decreed and judged to send the slave back home that's not even the right way to say it back home, back to his owner, back to the master, back to slavery.

Speaker 1:

Now I want you to think about that conflict and what that would do to a person where you believe something deeply and I think a lot of us have this in different ways, of course not with slavery but we may believe something deeply but yet we're doing something, we're acting in a way that is completely contrary to that. I mean the amount of people who I've talked to who are somewhat sympathetic to environmentalism and the destruction that they, in their minds, they think we're doing to the planet and all the bad things that are going along with that, and yet they work in some related oil industry. It's like hold on, what are you talking about here? Here's something about slavery and again a feeling that's going on at this time. This is from Ishmael. Who ain't a slave? Aren't we all slaves to a boss, to a family, to our society? Ah, but here's the thing. He says this at another point, something about there is a value in being paid. Being paid, what will compare with it? The Urbain activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills and that no amount of money can no amount can a moneyed man enter heaven with. So my argument for reading Moby Dick is that it's not only capturing something unique about the Western mind in the 19th century, but specifically about the American Western mind in the 19th century that I believe is dominant and prevalent today in the American mind. So if you want to understand America and American people, the psyche of the American on some level. This is the book to read.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I'm going to end with something here that's a little bit different. So I've talked about Ishmael and the modern man. That's me, that's you, the modern woman, and there's something about Ishmael's journey onto the Piquad. That's the ship. So the book is. The first three chapters are just him, you know, discussing some of these things, and as he's journeying around New England and eventually Nantucket, and then he goes on, he finally finds himself going on to Ahab's ship, which is the Piquad, with a group of ragtag, different types of people from all over the world, which is very American right, we're very diverse in America and we were back then. And then they go out on this adventure to go wailing, to kill whales so that they could harvest the oil of the whale within the inside, the whale's head, inside its body, take it out and the whole process of how to do that, to sell it all over the place so people can light their homes all over the world and in particular in America. But he finds himself on the ship where this monomaniacal, obsessive Ahab doesn't care about hunting for whales for oil to make money, which we just talked about. He actually cares about killing one whale. Moby did Now, as if you decide to go and explore this book, to read the whole of 550, 600 page book, I really hope you'll take what I'm about to tell you as helpful cue to help you understand a little bit more of what's required for this book, because it's not a normal novel where you're just going to sit back and get a plot.

Speaker 1:

There's something different going on here. So I want to. I'm going to read you a couple paragraphs in a second here of Chapter three, and this is going to be a lead for this if you decided to take this adventure. But because I warn you, if you need immediate and clear cut answers to the life's most complex and difficult questions, I will tell you now to turn ye to a Bible and sit quietly in your pew. This book is not for you.

Speaker 1:

So Milville's lead to answer some of these questions, to some of these things that were not clearly defining, is hazy at best, and he understands that. He explicitly knows this. But he's still going to try to go into the haze to get some meaning, because that's all the best he can do and he's an attempted to understand this undefinable core of our humanity, the indecipherable miasma upon which no computer no AI or otherwise will ever touch because it is uniquely and decipherably human. And I'm going to read a few short paragraphs here and I want you to think about. I'm going to describe a work of art. So in this is in the beginning of Chapter three, ishmael walks into the spouter, in that's the chapter title spouter, in, which is a place where he's going to try to spend the night. It's an, in, it's got food, but as he enters into it he sees this painting and he's trying to interpret, to understand the meaning of the painting. So interpretation is important, so pay attention to this. Now I hope you stick around to listen to these. It's just only a couple chat or a couple paragraphs that I'm going to read, not too much.

Speaker 1:

Entering that gable ended spouter in. You found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old fashioned Wayne scouts reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil painting, so thoroughly besmoked and every way defaced that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it and careful inquiry of the neighbors that you could anyway arrive at an understanding of its purpose, such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist in the time of the New England hags had endeavored to delineate. Chaos bewitched.

Speaker 1:

But by dint of much and earnest contemplation and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window toward the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted. But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous black mass of something hovering in the center of the picture over three blue, dim perpendicular float lines, floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squishy picture, truly enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant. Ever and on a bright but a last deceptive idea would dart you through. It's like the black sea in a midnight gale. It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. It's a blasted heath. It's a hyperborean winter scene. It's the breaking up of the icebound stream of time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentious something in the pictures midst that once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop, does it not bear a fair resemblance to a gigantic fish, even the great Leviathan himself? So here is a focal point, a magnifying glass upon which you can continue your reading of Moby Din Past, chapter 3.

Speaker 1:

Quoting again, only by diligence, study, in a series of systematic visits to it, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. That's what art is Systematic, visiting to it to understand its purpose, its meaning, and that's what life is. That's why art is so important, because it's about returning over and over again to try to understand it. It's not just about having a final answer and you're done, and then I'm over. It's over. I got the answer. Christianity told me I'm all done, where we go, okay, I just do what Christianity tells me. That's what most people like to do, that's what most people want, not you, not you.

Speaker 1:

Moby Dick is a fish tail, told by a man who simply says call me Ishmael. It is a ponderous book, one worth returning to. In other words, much like living through a complicated, disastrous, momentous life event. A divorce or a breakup is a simple one, but a plane crash, a war, a car crash, a political unrest, collapsing societies In the moment, these are inscrutable. When you're in a situation where gunfire is shot in your general direction and you, chaos ensues, if you're part of a school shooting or any mass shooting or any event, that's just extreme events, even a smaller events where you've discovered that a woman you love doesn't love you anymore, anything like that. You've discovered. You're adopted. It's only upon repeated reflections might one find truth or meaning, might find truth and meaning.

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So dive deeper still. Is there meaning to all of this at all life? That's what I mean by this. Did the fact that your brother had died young of cancer have meaning? Was cancer after your brother somehow was it chasing him, looming in the background of his life his whole time, but somehow not chasing you? At least not yet. What does one do amidst the seeming randomness of the universe and all that happens to man in it? Should we even ask these questions? Is asking the question what makes us human? Is there even an answer? All right, well, read Moby Dick, discover Herman Melville's views on this and much more. Then, after you've read not just the first three chapters but all the chapters in Moby Dick, ask yourself what do you think?