Evidence that whoever came up with this "performative reading" crap is trying to make us feeling guilty or embarrassed for reading valuable texts. Why would they want to do that? To keep us stupid.
This was wonderful. Moby-Dick is truly inexhaustible.
It's been about a decade since I last read it, but I'd be very curious to know your thoughts on Mardi. If you've never read Mardi—oho, you're in for a treat if you ever pick it up. If The Whale is the meditations of a seasoned psychonaut, the Voyage Thither is like the notebook someone scribbled in after eating his first tab. There are moments in the text where Melville appears to be contacting the All Feeling and getting completely floored by it.
Early in my long, wandering post-secondary navigations, I took concurrent courses in Am-lit and "Existentialism," at Victoria College in Toronto, home of Northrup Frye and Roberston Davies. As a dingy racer since early youth, I was thrilled to discover in the two epic but contrasting tomes a matched set of page-turning-paragraphs so very similar in tenor and expression, exorting the reader in the sort of baldly figurative flourish that has a confiding, extra-textual quality, never but never to head to port in a storm; instead to fix your eyes and your bows to sea, as that is the paradoxical gauntlet of liberation: the "ordeal medicine" that can deliver the storm-tossed to safety!
Assigned the task of analyzing a page or more of text from each, I took the methods and concerns of each discipline to hand and wrote parallel comparisons, one to the other and the other to the one. That was a fatal gambit--as proud as I was to wed Soren and Herman on the wind-sheared waves of their heady prose--as I received a summary, un-notated, red-scrawled "F" on each. The hands of the professors were astonishingly similar.
Please watch for that passage! ....and maybe those iNvidious chips in their "Descartian vortices" can help you locate the premonitory locutions from the multifarious Dane's alternate universe....
And thanks for this bold, brave, brilliant piece! You are nearer a bosun's mate than exigete...
I’m loving the Moby Dick adventure. I knew going in I would be over my head among heavy hitters, I’m glad I took the voyage!
I have no idea if Melville intended anything, but another fellow mentioned wanting to reread the bible, and I also have the same feeling along with wanting to attend church.
Now that you mention the mad king Trump, I see why I had problems with Ahab on my first read. I still think, though I’m not at the end n forget how it ends, that Quee Queg may be god in the pure instant selfless manner he behaves, I love him and his black idol and pipe!
And also, worth a mention is the horrible working conditions on board those ships. Lastly, I have also been having insomnia over this book, I keep thinking of the possibility of inter species communications in the scene with the huge pod of whales nursing their young.
I certainly have a better appreciation for how I eat.
I’ll be at sea for a while now, I will listen to the audio version next.
Hey Juan, that's whats cool about big books like this: we are ALL in over our heads. We just keep swimming and trying to avoid the sharks! Melville's language is very Biblical for sure, especially the King James version that was popular in the 19th century. But I think the real source of spiritual power is with the "pagans" like Queequeg! good luck with your reading...
Brilliant, thank you! Moby Dick is one of my favorite books. Lately I've been thinking also of the Quakers who own the Pequod, and their calm, capitalistic, calculations of whale death, and the worth of every man on the ship calculated and categorized in portions of take. It's the Calvinistic side of the Puritanical US experiment, too.
Absolutely. This is what Weber's famous book about Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism is all about. People talk about the "Puritan" strain of the United States but its really the Calvinist strain that has the biggest impact. There is nothing we can do to try and win God's grace or get into heaven, so you might as well just accumulate...
Good writing as always Erik... That Melville comment to Hawthorne reminded me of where I first read it, in Kurt Andersen's excellent book "Fantasyland" (p102) where he discusses it in terms of American uniqueness and individuality, "Melville appreciated the delicious, seductive power of their peers’ transcendental ecstasies, but he also understood them to be on a slippery slope
You know I have never read Anderson's book and people keep talking about it. I think when it came out I wasnt ready to be quite as critical about this side of American culture, because I really enjoyed (and wrote a lot) about all the craziness and fantasies. These days that book is looking very prescient...That's one of the great things about Melville -- intellectually he is very much an existential loner, but he had a good heart that resisted that solipsism for a very democratic affirmation of "mariners, renegades, and castaways."
About the Transcendentalist era of the mid-19th century US: I've been reading No Man Knows My History by Fawn Brodie, the biography of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion. My main takeaway is that the "burned-over district" of 1820s-1830s New York State- and adjacent territories in the Midwest- was just nuts. Rife with folk magic, diviners, Christian crisis cults, charismatic evangelists- and the sort of competition for followers, fame, and fortune that sometimes broke out into something like gang warfare. The concept of the psychically driven treasure hunt was not the sole provenance of Joseph Smith (initially inspired by an angelic visit he claimed to have received at the age of 17, attested to by his family.) Other Americans of the day were pursuing similar Mystical Quests. And it could get pretty wild. Kidnappings, thievery, killings, feuds, armed attacks by inflamed mobs of rival congregations, schisms, factional rivalries between God-intoxicated preachers, each with their own peculiar visions, shadowboxing the apocalypse and wandering the land.
Americans are crazy, I tell you. Particularly in the Great Lakes region in the 1830s, the Big Questions weighed on the minds of many.
That is a classic book, I really like Brodie's take. It was kinda the first bio to dig up all that wacky stuff. Another great book about early Mormonism, a bit more scholarly, is The Refiner's Fire by John Brooke, which unearths all sorts of stuff about magic, Masonry, and Egyptomania in Smith's times. Melville kinda missed that stuff but Transcendentalism is kinda like the genteel Boston form of the fire!
I'm still trying to fit that history into the wider context...like, who were these people? I'm more or less co-ethnic with these 19th century wasperoos, but they're as exotic as cargo cultists. MY version of Transcendentalism, on the other hand...
at least I have enough sense to not prosyletize. I've as yet made no attempt to parlay my personal paranormal visions into an Influencer Hustle.
As for Moby-Dick, the first 40 or so pages I read of the book really impressed me. But Nonfiction interfered, and I still haven't gotten back to it. A poor excuse, I know. Melville had a serious eye for detail. For signs and their significance. Maybe that's why I haven't revisited the book. The labyrinth of metaphor, I'm always skeptical of such enclosure. Like, why is it this and not that, and so forth...the English language is a white whale. The bookshelf is...a horse! &c. Deep Fiction taxes my poor brains. Which also likely explains why I've held off from reading the Russians.
I would put Melville in a different category to the Russians because, in Moby-Dick anyway. there is a lot of "nonfiction." And while the metaphors and allusions are labyrinths, the "labyrinth" is also one of those metaphors, and the book interrogates and pierces through metaphors as much as minting them. I bet you would dig!
… & an idea: (i.e. future post?) as you’ve said you feel absolutely unprepared for taking on Madame Polly Crisis in a WWE bout - might you consider commentator of a rematch w self-professed WWE adoring opponent Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio? Just a thought. Although it’s making me feel better already..
Thanks a million for this. I'm not able to participate in the Moby-Dick program you're running right now, which is too bad because it is my favorite book (whatever that means).
I'm always heartened when I find people who have read it and seen it for what it is: the strangest, funniest, scariest, most esoteric, most twisted, most head-spinning, Weirdest book in English that I know of. It is Weirder than Finnegans Wake, in its way, and I'm currently in a Wake reading group. Oh, and it's a good adventure story. The second time I read it was during a period of great demoralization leading up to and including the election of Trump I, and I couldn't believe how relevant it was. But to read it as an allegory for current events, however useful, reduces it. Besides, that's what a work of prophecy is, right? A work that is always relevant.
Absolutely. Prophecy outbeats allegory everytime. I havent done the Wake more than a handful of pages here and there, so will withhold my final judgment, but I can pretty much guarantee that I'm more likely to stick to the long weird wake of Moby-Dick in the long run...
What's the comment version of a standing ovation, because that's what I want to put here.
Thanks man! This one had the fire, borrowed from the Whale!
Evidence that whoever came up with this "performative reading" crap is trying to make us feeling guilty or embarrassed for reading valuable texts. Why would they want to do that? To keep us stupid.
Fantastic post!
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/t-magazine/bethany-collins-moby-dick.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SFA.Y5ui.Y-mnmGN8sBF_&smid=url-share
This was wonderful. Moby-Dick is truly inexhaustible.
It's been about a decade since I last read it, but I'd be very curious to know your thoughts on Mardi. If you've never read Mardi—oho, you're in for a treat if you ever pick it up. If The Whale is the meditations of a seasoned psychonaut, the Voyage Thither is like the notebook someone scribbled in after eating his first tab. There are moments in the text where Melville appears to be contacting the All Feeling and getting completely floored by it.
What a feast. Those excerpts, especially the title passage, are just breathtaking.
There are so many good passages in that book its just nuts! No wonder there is such an enormous literature on the guy.
Erik,
Early in my long, wandering post-secondary navigations, I took concurrent courses in Am-lit and "Existentialism," at Victoria College in Toronto, home of Northrup Frye and Roberston Davies. As a dingy racer since early youth, I was thrilled to discover in the two epic but contrasting tomes a matched set of page-turning-paragraphs so very similar in tenor and expression, exorting the reader in the sort of baldly figurative flourish that has a confiding, extra-textual quality, never but never to head to port in a storm; instead to fix your eyes and your bows to sea, as that is the paradoxical gauntlet of liberation: the "ordeal medicine" that can deliver the storm-tossed to safety!
Assigned the task of analyzing a page or more of text from each, I took the methods and concerns of each discipline to hand and wrote parallel comparisons, one to the other and the other to the one. That was a fatal gambit--as proud as I was to wed Soren and Herman on the wind-sheared waves of their heady prose--as I received a summary, un-notated, red-scrawled "F" on each. The hands of the professors were astonishingly similar.
Please watch for that passage! ....and maybe those iNvidious chips in their "Descartian vortices" can help you locate the premonitory locutions from the multifarious Dane's alternate universe....
And thanks for this bold, brave, brilliant piece! You are nearer a bosun's mate than exigete...
OH! I didn't mention the Kierkegaard book... nor even his name, until, too familiarly, at the end...
It's "The Concluding Unscientific Postscript"
Maybe another good grounding rod?
I should probably proof my comments, in future...
(note to self)
Thanks Erik!
I’m loving the Moby Dick adventure. I knew going in I would be over my head among heavy hitters, I’m glad I took the voyage!
I have no idea if Melville intended anything, but another fellow mentioned wanting to reread the bible, and I also have the same feeling along with wanting to attend church.
Now that you mention the mad king Trump, I see why I had problems with Ahab on my first read. I still think, though I’m not at the end n forget how it ends, that Quee Queg may be god in the pure instant selfless manner he behaves, I love him and his black idol and pipe!
And also, worth a mention is the horrible working conditions on board those ships. Lastly, I have also been having insomnia over this book, I keep thinking of the possibility of inter species communications in the scene with the huge pod of whales nursing their young.
I certainly have a better appreciation for how I eat.
I’ll be at sea for a while now, I will listen to the audio version next.
Hey Juan, that's whats cool about big books like this: we are ALL in over our heads. We just keep swimming and trying to avoid the sharks! Melville's language is very Biblical for sure, especially the King James version that was popular in the 19th century. But I think the real source of spiritual power is with the "pagans" like Queequeg! good luck with your reading...
Brilliant, thank you! Moby Dick is one of my favorite books. Lately I've been thinking also of the Quakers who own the Pequod, and their calm, capitalistic, calculations of whale death, and the worth of every man on the ship calculated and categorized in portions of take. It's the Calvinistic side of the Puritanical US experiment, too.
Absolutely. This is what Weber's famous book about Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism is all about. People talk about the "Puritan" strain of the United States but its really the Calvinist strain that has the biggest impact. There is nothing we can do to try and win God's grace or get into heaven, so you might as well just accumulate...
Good writing as always Erik... That Melville comment to Hawthorne reminded me of where I first read it, in Kurt Andersen's excellent book "Fantasyland" (p102) where he discusses it in terms of American uniqueness and individuality, "Melville appreciated the delicious, seductive power of their peers’ transcendental ecstasies, but he also understood them to be on a slippery slope
toward a very American solipsism."
You know I have never read Anderson's book and people keep talking about it. I think when it came out I wasnt ready to be quite as critical about this side of American culture, because I really enjoyed (and wrote a lot) about all the craziness and fantasies. These days that book is looking very prescient...That's one of the great things about Melville -- intellectually he is very much an existential loner, but he had a good heart that resisted that solipsism for a very democratic affirmation of "mariners, renegades, and castaways."
About the Transcendentalist era of the mid-19th century US: I've been reading No Man Knows My History by Fawn Brodie, the biography of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion. My main takeaway is that the "burned-over district" of 1820s-1830s New York State- and adjacent territories in the Midwest- was just nuts. Rife with folk magic, diviners, Christian crisis cults, charismatic evangelists- and the sort of competition for followers, fame, and fortune that sometimes broke out into something like gang warfare. The concept of the psychically driven treasure hunt was not the sole provenance of Joseph Smith (initially inspired by an angelic visit he claimed to have received at the age of 17, attested to by his family.) Other Americans of the day were pursuing similar Mystical Quests. And it could get pretty wild. Kidnappings, thievery, killings, feuds, armed attacks by inflamed mobs of rival congregations, schisms, factional rivalries between God-intoxicated preachers, each with their own peculiar visions, shadowboxing the apocalypse and wandering the land.
Americans are crazy, I tell you. Particularly in the Great Lakes region in the 1830s, the Big Questions weighed on the minds of many.
That is a classic book, I really like Brodie's take. It was kinda the first bio to dig up all that wacky stuff. Another great book about early Mormonism, a bit more scholarly, is The Refiner's Fire by John Brooke, which unearths all sorts of stuff about magic, Masonry, and Egyptomania in Smith's times. Melville kinda missed that stuff but Transcendentalism is kinda like the genteel Boston form of the fire!
I'm still trying to fit that history into the wider context...like, who were these people? I'm more or less co-ethnic with these 19th century wasperoos, but they're as exotic as cargo cultists. MY version of Transcendentalism, on the other hand...
at least I have enough sense to not prosyletize. I've as yet made no attempt to parlay my personal paranormal visions into an Influencer Hustle.
As for Moby-Dick, the first 40 or so pages I read of the book really impressed me. But Nonfiction interfered, and I still haven't gotten back to it. A poor excuse, I know. Melville had a serious eye for detail. For signs and their significance. Maybe that's why I haven't revisited the book. The labyrinth of metaphor, I'm always skeptical of such enclosure. Like, why is it this and not that, and so forth...the English language is a white whale. The bookshelf is...a horse! &c. Deep Fiction taxes my poor brains. Which also likely explains why I've held off from reading the Russians.
I would put Melville in a different category to the Russians because, in Moby-Dick anyway. there is a lot of "nonfiction." And while the metaphors and allusions are labyrinths, the "labyrinth" is also one of those metaphors, and the book interrogates and pierces through metaphors as much as minting them. I bet you would dig!
you have me thinking about it.
… & an idea: (i.e. future post?) as you’ve said you feel absolutely unprepared for taking on Madame Polly Crisis in a WWE bout - might you consider commentator of a rematch w self-professed WWE adoring opponent Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio? Just a thought. Although it’s making me feel better already..
Hahaha! I love it. THAT's a match for the ages...
✨🙏 l i s t e n i n g 🙏✨
Thanks a million for this. I'm not able to participate in the Moby-Dick program you're running right now, which is too bad because it is my favorite book (whatever that means).
I'm always heartened when I find people who have read it and seen it for what it is: the strangest, funniest, scariest, most esoteric, most twisted, most head-spinning, Weirdest book in English that I know of. It is Weirder than Finnegans Wake, in its way, and I'm currently in a Wake reading group. Oh, and it's a good adventure story. The second time I read it was during a period of great demoralization leading up to and including the election of Trump I, and I couldn't believe how relevant it was. But to read it as an allegory for current events, however useful, reduces it. Besides, that's what a work of prophecy is, right? A work that is always relevant.
Absolutely. Prophecy outbeats allegory everytime. I havent done the Wake more than a handful of pages here and there, so will withhold my final judgment, but I can pretty much guarantee that I'm more likely to stick to the long weird wake of Moby-Dick in the long run...
"heavy works of great literature" indeed.
Try an alternative:
https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/how-do-psychedelics-work