in The Endless Depths of Moby-Dick Symbolism David Gilbert comments:

What does it mean? There are so many symbols as to render symbols meaningless. And yet, like Ahab, we insist on plucking the heart of its mystery. As Ishmael says, "And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do the hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way." Moby-Dick might as well be that enigmatic doubloon nailed to the main-mast, the prize for anyone who first grasps the white whale.

And maybe, when all is said and done, the book moves me on a more basic level, because I have always loved whales, ever since I was a boy and pushed aside the impossible math of dinosaurs – 65 million years ago? – my imagination frustrated by all those bones in need of flesh and skin, my soul crushed by the most awesome aspect of our world, already long gone. Instead I embraced the giants that did exist among us, and fellow mammals too, the blue whale, the right whale, the humpback whale – Christ, I loved humpback whales – my room littered with books and books on whales, whale posters on my wall – the narwhal, the beluga – and I joined Save the Whales and stuck their sticker on the back window of our Country Squire station wagon, and I fought against Iceland and Japan and their cruel whaling ways, my fight very local and mostly confined within two-thousand square feet on 73rd and Lexington, but I fought nevertheless – though I never did like the killer whale – and I cheered on Greenpeace and its Rainbow Warrior. Maybe in my early teens I tittered over the sperm whale and its shameful onanistic shadow, but I certainly did my time in front of the famous diorama at the Natural History Museum – sperm whale versus giant squid – my eyes keen to the cheap showmanship of poured fiberglass yet also sinking down into those ultraviolet spheres and imagining a secret world that glowed like velvet in black light. So Moby-Dick, in its baroque manner, speaks to me at ten years old as well as to me at forty-six.

^z - 2022-12-19