What Happens When You Poke the Sea-Bear: The Moby Dick Post-mortem

That was awesome.

I really enjoyed Moby Dick, and not just for the cathartic feeling of not being on a whaling ship in the mid-19th century. I really enjoyed the climax; such pretty language being used to describe so much action. The soliloquies at the last seemed a bit much, but the modern trend toward brevity certainly didn't start with this book anyway.

The unreasonable and reckless pursuit of vengeance, the retention of bitterness and/or ill will, and the willingness to risk all in pursuit of a single event or thing: all of that is there in spades. It's a lot about greed, both spiritual and financial, isn't it? In the end, it mattered little that the crew or the ship or anyone else would be used in search of Ahab's ultimate goal. He wasn't about to turn away from his quest for vengeance. Regardless of the cost.

To be fair, though, many watershed events of human history wouldn't have been possible without the obsessions and lack of reason and enormous human costs sustained by the people who drove those events to fruition. Achieving high goals is often only possible by the rejection of much else in a life. It's how the amazing things get done.

But Ahab wasn't doing anything amazing, even if he thought he was. Melville rendered even the unbelieveable (finding a single whale through more than one ocean, for instance) into an act comparable to changing your socks. Ahab sought vengeance on the whale that took his leg, viewing his injury as a personal insult. He defrauded his partners and killed his crew and himself to get it. He gave up everything, including his perspective, which is the thing that determines what you can give up in the first place. Keep that healthy and everything else stays in line. Lose it and the rest follows.

A Question: Everybody has a story about Moby Dick, it seems. Mine is that my mother taught it. What's yours?