Things I learned from Moby Dick

This morning I finished Moby Dick, and I have to say I'm a bit proud of this. I see it as an accomplishment. It's not something I ever thought I would read, or really ever had any interest in until recently, having assumed erroneously that I probably wouldn't like it much. And though I personally feel that Melville's later writing (especially Billy Budd) is actually better than his great sprawling opus on whaling and obsession (in part precisely because it is so sprawling - I seem to like Melville the same way I like Tolstoy, that is with a reasonable word limit) Moby Dick's still a damn god book. And surprisingly accessible.

Anyway, Moby Dick might have a claim to be one of the forerunners of edutainment, what with all the digressions on whales and whaling life. So, in that spirit, here's what Melville taught me along with a few observations of my own:

• Quakers are badasses. Seriously, Ahab's a fucking Quaker! I mean, I know there's more to Quakerism than sitting around quietly in rooms and being conscientious objectors, but this sort of gave me a new-found respect for them. Ahab certainly has his faults, but a lack of badass-ness is not one of them. If anything, he's too badass, know what I mean?

• I can't really imagine how big a whale is. Like, I kept picturing them as a manageable size and then having to stop and be all 'wait, no, it's so much bigger than the boat!' or 'holy shit, you can drown in a whale's head!' I bet Freud would have had a field day with this book, and likely whalers in general, as they all clearly have a deathwish.

• Melville thought whales were fish. Despite the fact that he discusses that they need to surface to breathe and have nipples, he was totally convinced they were decidedly not mammals. He's got a whole chapter to this effect.

• Harpooners were the rock stars of whaling ships.

• Ishmael and I are two peas in a pod. There's a sort of running joke between me and Jon, and before that me and my father, that I'm substantially more difficult to match with fictional characters than most people. I think this is because I'm a fundamentally boring person who doesn't do much and those aren't the sort of people one often writes about unless one wants to write a fundamentally boring book (case in point: I bear a number of similarities to Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's snarky, hermetic, fat older brother, but Doyle didn't make Mycroft his protagonist precisely because the man was rarely out of his bathrobe and had no interest in actually proving his theories via legwork, and the legwork's the interesting stuff). But, all that said, me and Ishmael are of like minds.
  

• Starbuck is one of the most tragic characters in fiction.

• Stubb is one of the most ambiguous characters in fiction (although I read him as a canny, clever sort in line with the Fool in King Lear) and one of the only ones I've ever read that's able to get away with referring to himself in the third person without it being obnoxious.

• I knew Melville was prone to homoeroticism (it's one of the reasons I like him, frankly), but it's hit critical mass here. Well, technically, I think Billy Budd's got it beat in terms of density, but it was a major driving force of the plot there and here it's just sort of incidental. In any case, there was a moment where the whalers were carrying around a giant whale penis on the ship -- past masts and other sundry already phallic things -- which was just hilarious. This was is in addition to the rom-com tone of the first section where Ishmael and Queequeeg become 'close' and the much famed "Squeeze of the Hand" chapter.