In high school, I gave up on my friends and started eating lunch in the hall alone, sitting on the floor, back against the wall, reading. When they came to check on me, I kept a finger in my battered copy of Moby-Dick till they left. Now that they’ve turned out to be great people, I look back and question what I was really looking for. I barely understood a word during the six months it took to read, yet the occasional sentence did punch through my ignorance. “Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.”
In New Bedford, Massachusetts on January 10, 2016, Allison and I joined the 24 hour Moby-Dick Marathon the night before we moved to Spain. Under the bones of a whale hung from the museum ceiling, sitting on a replica ship next to coiled rope, in the chapel across the street where Father Mapple sermonizes on Jonah, we listened to volunteer readers progress through the novel with a New York Times journalist, whole families collapsed in the hall in their sleeping bags by the third watch, and experts from around the world devoted to Herman Melville. We read at 3:50 am and 4:00 am, respectively, survived the night.
I asked an expert whether Melville had rubbed off on him, what his own best travel story was. He said in Fiji at the end of a year of travel in his youth, he was robbed and came back with nothing. He found his way to an island where the men sit and drink kava for hours on end. In fact, to get there he hitched a ride on a fishing boat whose pilot made him find roots to present the chief. He observed that the two daily tides swept in an abundance of shellfish. “So whatever they needed to eat was just left on their doorstep each day. Like Melville in Typee, you felt as though you were free from the penalty of the Fall.” During the full moon on his last night, he followed the girls of the village up a creek bed to collect periwinkles by the light of beer bottles filled with kerosene.
I don’t know whether Melville seduced or saved me.
