Thar She Blows

I’m into my second attempt to read “Moby Dick”, the literary classic by Herman Melville. My first attempt (25 years ago) failed because I was too impatient to absorb the more thoughtful passages, especially with Melville’s mid-nineteenth century writing style.

In fact, “Moby Dick” was not too well-received at first, back in 1850, being criticized as digressing and meandering too much. 100 years later, all the “unnecessary” stuff was left out of the movie version, and it made for a cool movie. The Gregory Peck version of Captain Ahab is pretty well stuck in my head, no matter how the book describes the character.

The narrating character, a somewhat spaced-out young guy named Ishmael, enjoyed being the lookout up on top of the mast, in the crow’s nest, 100 feet in the air. Up there he truly “got away from it all” --

“There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks….” , so says Ishmael in one of his dreamy passages.

Bankrupt securities? Fall of stocks? So strange, people were concerned about that stuff way back in 1850. But if you were a young guy like Ishmael, you could free yourself from the whole thing by going out on a 3-year whaling contract. Even if you had some stock investments, the 3 years at sea would force you to forget about it for that time.

Judging by the financial news of the past few days, I think there’s a few million people who could use a few weeks on an 1850 whaling ship, with a couple of two-hour shifts a day up in the crow’s nest, looking around for whales. Truly a getaway, in both time and place.

The ms Amsterdam will provide no such getaway. On a cruise ship in 2008, you can stay totally in touch with everybody and everything that you left on land. Telephones, internet, wireless and satellite systems, allow you to stay in touch with every damn thing. A morning 8-page news synopsis printout of the NY Times is placed on the door of every guest. CNN is on 24 hours a day, uses the slogan “your world today”, and comes out crystal clear on your cabin TV, no matter where you are.

And so I watch the McCain-Obama debate on CNN, at 9:00 AM, 12 hours removed from NYC. The presidential election story, with election day only 4 weeks away, has
actually been eclipsed by the bizarre developments in the global economy.

I guess whaling ships are few and far between these days, with “Save the Whales” and all that. But even if there is a whaling ship sailing around as I write this, I’ll bet every whaler has a TV in his cabin, with CNN. And so you make your 100 foot climb up the rope ladder, to the crow’s nest, with “global financial meltdown” fresh in your head.

Anyway, I’m 1/3 of the way through “Moby Dick”, getting nicely lost in the book for a few minutes each day as the drama slowly unfolds. And as I do my exercise walk around the deck later on, I look out on the sea imagining that big white whale suddenly jumping out, “as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier…”