It's high time I read Moby-Dick, a work I somehow escaped in my formal education and early life.  I've really been missing something:
"Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to breakfast. 
They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company.  Not always, though:  Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor.  But perhaps the mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's performances -- this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social polish.  Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had anywhere. . . .  
But as for Queequeg -- why, Queequeg sat there among them -- at the head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle.  To be sure I cannot say much for his breeding.  His greatest admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks toward him.  But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.

19 comments:

Grim said...

It is an excellent book. I read it for the first time in China, which was a great time for me in terms of literary reading. At that time it was nearly impossible to get current English-language works there due to government censorship, so the only English books you could get at the bookstores were classics. I read Ivanhoe for the first time there, and Moby Dick, Waverly, some Shakespeare and Dickens and Tolstoy, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and others I can't at the moment recall. Three cheers for censorship, I suppose!

Anonymous said...

No Cheers for cencorship Grim! But Moby Dick is a fantastic work. A bit of a pain in so many parts, but like a break in the clouds comes an occasional paragraph that is perfect. If you pay attention to the craft, you will learn about the art of seeking, killing and harvesting whales. But if you pay attention to Melville's depiction of men engaged in activity towards that end...you may learn as much about Men as Whales.

Anonymous said...

Good Luck. Like most people, I couldn't get anywhere with it. I much preferred Melville's earlier work.

jose

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed the whaling bits, and some of rest of the book. But I'm the one who hunted up a complete edition to read when the rest of my English class got a version that omitted everything about sailing and whaling that could be omitted.

LittleRed1

Cass said...

I read Moby Dick as a child and got very little out of it.

I read it again as a junior in HS for my English class and was absolutely stunned by the richness of the work. Until that moment, I don't think I really appreciated how much a well read teacher can add to one's understanding of literature.

Mr. Babcock, if you ever wondered whether your teaching made a difference in anyone's life, you did. And I will never forget how you opened my eyes.

Eric Blair said...

Yes, it is a book usually wasted on middle schoolers or high schoolers.

The best way, I think, is to come across it as T99 and Grim did, without it being 'homework'.

Eric Blair said...

Yes, it is a book usually wasted on middle schoolers or high schoolers. (Cass obviously excepted).

The best way, I think, is to come across it as T99 and Grim did, without it being 'homework'.


Lars Walker said...

I agree with most of the above. I was warned against reading it by my brother as a child, and prudently waited until I'd grown up. At that point it blew me away. More like Shakespeare than any other book I know.

Cass said...

It was often my experience as a child that I would try to read a work of classic literature and it just wouldn't "click" for me the first time.

So I'd wait a year or two and try again... and again. And eventually, I would have the requisite experience to appreciate what before had seemed boring and irrelevant.

What my English teacher managed to do for me was to show me the things I was missing. IOW, what Lars and Eric said :p

I will say that although I read many tedious works in school, having a set curriculum not only forced me to read things I ordinarily would not have, but gave me the background to understand other works. Just having read the Bible cover to cover (though I did this on my own as a child) made it possible to see how heavily it is referenced in literature.

Amazing, and wonderful, stuff.

Texan99 said...

I can think of a lot of stuff there probably was no point in my trying to read in my teens or even early 20s. At that age I required adventure stories, or stories about rebellion, hypocrisy, and injustice, with accessible protagonists. Faulkner was good, or Tolstoy, or Hardy, but "Silas Marner" would have been an awful idea. I remember being given "Rasselas" to read in high school and having no idea what to make of it. To this day, for some reason, I cannot read Dickens.

bthun said...

I think exposing young minds to works that may possibly, probably be beyond their ability to fully appreciate at the time is good exercise, if nothing else.

And having read many tales, like Moby Dick, as a child, I'm now persuaded to read it again.
//Considers the FIFO stack of to be read items and the to be done before winter tasks//
Make that, at some point in the future.

Cass said...

I loved Dickens, even as a child, and though I tried valiantly to plow through his books, couldn't abide Faulkner. I have no idea why, but he was one of the few authors who would cause me to abandon a book.

...which is more impressive than it might seem, given the fact that I waded through War and Peace multiple times.

I often thing having a frame of reference helps - maybe nothing in Faulkner appealed to anything in my experience or background? At some point in my childhood, something caused me to become interested in Russia, so I devoured Russian novels: Tolstoy, Doestoyevsky (that's probably spelled wrong but I'm too lazy to look it up).

Maybe part of it begins with something that captures the imagination? I ended up studying Russian in college. My only real regret about leaving school was that I had planned to spend a semester in Russia.

Cass said...

I often thing...

Sometimes, I think, too. But not too often because it is exhausting :p

The Mind is a Terrible Thing

Grim said...

Sometimes even great authors are writing about things that aren't right for you. It's OK if you didn't like Faulkner, I think; I don't particularly like Dickens. His works have always conveyed to me the strong flavor of having been paid for by the word.

Texan99 said...

No, I loved Faulkner and Hardy and all those dramatic, intense, depressed guys -- just right for a moody teenager or post-adolescent. It was the ones who were writing about things that wouldn't make sense until I was more grown up that were the problem.

It's not always age-appropriateness, though. I always thought I would come to like Dickens eventually, but I guess it isn't going to happen. I don't think "The Scarlet Letter" is going to grow on me, either.

Grim said...

You know, a famous early American author I've never liked was Fenimore Cooper. Mark Twain's skewering of his works was on target.

Texan99 said...

I tried "Mohicans" recently and was appalled. There's a kind of obsession with racial purity laced all through the book that's offensive when it's not boring.

Cass's remarks suggest to me that I'm generalizing about age-appropriateness. The fact is that some works appealed to my particular personality and experience as a teenager, while others couldn't reach me until I was older. Other young readers, with a different childhood, could be reached by other kinds of works.

If I can make any defensible generalization at all, maybe it's that very young people will do better with books with an active plot than with authors whose charm will turn out to be a complicated and indirect social commentary that requires a mastery of all kinds of hints and allusions.

E Hines said...

...couldn't abide Faulkner.

You haven't lived until you've waded through James Joyce and his rambling, which dilettantes call "stream of conscious."

Or try to get through Sartre's The Age of Reason.

The joys of having one's own mother for high school English. A pleasure my older brother had, also.

Eric Hines

Cass said...

Joyce is (YES!)another author whose artistry (YES!) I was (YES!)apparently not (YES!) evolved enough to (YES!) appreciate :p

Some Brit paper posts the annual Bad Sex Scene awards every year. I think of Joyce fondly every time I see it.