Books

Melville does not attack traditional ideas about God with the object of replacing them with better ideas; his mission is prophetic, that of calling us to a deeper life. He is a forerunner of religious writers in our own time, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Elie Wiesel, whose keynote is the maintenance of discourse concerning ultimate Read more

Finished Moby-Dick this weekend – wow, what a book! The literary genre-hopping, the cosmological speculations, the epic scale, the humor, the unforgettable characters, the ornate, rhythmic splendor of the language – is there any other novel like it? (I’m not even sure it is a novel!) I think it may have supplanted The Brothers Karamazov Read more

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own Read more

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at Read more