To a young soul like mine holding the book, it was an adventure, quite scary but also more than a little exhilarating. I must confess now I couldn’t even read beyond the opening line, "Call me Ishmael" (and not just because there was a brownout). It was simply beyond my mastery at the time. But I remember memorizing and reciting the epilogue, satisfied with the assurance that I knew what it was all about, through the simplified (and sanitized) Saturday-morning cartoon version I’d seen too many times on television, where Moby-Dick looked less a whale than an oversized Flipper, and Ishmael wore a sailor’s uniform when he was supposed to be a whaler. I was so sure I wanted to be Captain Ahab.
The Moby-Dick I did finally read as an adult may be branded a metaphor for that shark – reality biting into disillusioned youth. When my boat of idealism sank, the heart it brought down with it was heavy and huge as the great white whale. And hardly did I survive the wreck. My unabridged "grown-up" copy was three times as long as my old one, and flooded with ambiguity as endless as the search for the secret of the universe that ironically, the more I read it, and the more I found out, the less I understood. And the more I felt lost at sea. (So much for my acquired mastery over the years.) It didn’t feel at all like an adventure, but a seasick, wearisome journey through the ocean of life. I felt like one of the whalers in the book, kidnapped from his blissful terrestrial existence, drunk and awakened in the middle of the sea. Feeling cheated but helpless to do anything; the only other choice left is to jump ship.
The "devious-cruising" ship of life that Melville describes is a cargo-full of deception and obsession. The captain-leader I had admired as a child turned out to be a madman, a fanatic obsessed with hunting down what he claimed as evil. Ahab is so blinded by his mission he’s more than willing to take everyone down with him. He is hell-bent on destroying humanity because he insists that it needs to be saved. And he believes he’s the one to do it. (Hmm… a revolutionary?) Stared at the evil fire for too long and became corrupted by it. He entices his men, the whalers (the masa?), with promises and a gold coin (no… a politician!) and they are hypnotized, mesmerized by the false fire, caught up in the whirlpool of hysteria. It is a familiar allegory for our times.
As for me, personally, God knows I should have gone down a long time ago, dragged into the vortex. I must confess again, I did more than a couple of times peek at that fire myself. And I did come close to drowning in all that stereotypical youthful idealism, frustrated by an abyss of intellectual, physical and moral degeneration, cruising towards self-destruction. All because I wanted to be in on the search, too. Restless, I was looking for a shore on which to moor permanently. For a while that gold coin was very tempting.
Were it not, though, for that curse my character type seems to fall under, that of the would-be narrator’s trait of eternal noninvolvement, a sense of isolation and aversion to what Ishmael called the "mob of unnecessary duplicates," which turned out to be my coffin-lifebuoy, as it did the Pequod’s lone survivor. For a long time I didn’t want to admit it. But I was not an Ahab; I was an Ishmael.
One last confession, and this may seem strange, but I touched ocean water only when I was already in my 20s. And as I stood on the shore, staring at that deceivingly serene vastness, the emotion impressed upon me was not one of exhilaration, but of panic and fear. I thought I suddenly understood what the character Pip must have felt when lost at sea. It really can drive you mad, the thought of being confronted by being alone in the middle of the universe.
But it somehow gave Pip wisdom, too, making him see the doom they were all leading for trying to chase evil or, for that matter, God.
Maybe like Pip, I have gained a little wisdom from all of my life experiences, albeit a cynical one, it would seem. And whatever my Ishmael sensibilities are, they are keeping me afloat. I am here now, able to tell my story, because of one book.