A Careful Disorderliness | Forty Riffs on Moby-Dick

I did not set out to write forty riffs on Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick but that’s where I ended up. I don’t think what I’ve done here is a resource of any worth, but I do hope to encourage people to read this funny, humane, poetic, and devastating novel.

Here are links by chapter to the riffs I riffed on Moby-Dick in 2021.

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Illustrations in this post are by the American artist Barry Moser.

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Ch. 1 (The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open)

Ch. 2-4  (Nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom)

Ch. 5-8  (All these things are not without their meanings)

Ch. 9-13  (No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world)

Ch. 14-16 (Oblique hints)

Ch. 17-19  (Humbug or bugbear)

Ch. 20-22 (First kick)

Ch. 23-27 (Whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb)

Ch. 28-32 (God keep me from ever completing anything)

Ch. 33-35 (Your identity comes back in horror)

Ch. 36 (Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me)

Ch. 37-48 (And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?)

Ch. 49-54 (Certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life)

Ch. 55-57  (The great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last)

Ch. 58-60 (A certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men)

Ch. 61-73 (The mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable)

Ch. 74-75 (Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it.)

Ch. 76-80 (A very precious perishing)

Ch. 81-83 (There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method)

Ch. 84-86  (Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly)

Ch. 87 (There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men)

Ch. 88-90 (Loose-fish/fast-fish)

Ch. 91-93 (The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?)

Ch. 94-98 (Let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness)

Ch. 99 (“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look”)

Ch. 100 (Face set like a flint)

Ch. 101-05 (Horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale)

Ch. 106-08 (The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers)

Ch. 109-11 (Millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries)

Ch. 112 (Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried)

Ch. 113-17 (Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them)

Ch. 118-19 (Thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief)

Ch. 120-22 (All of us are Ahabs)

Ch. 123 (Wild nights)

Ch. 124-26 (Human sort of wail)

Ch. 127-29 (A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further?)

Ch. 130-32 (The least heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight)

Ch. 133-34 (That wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils)

Ch. 135-Epilogue (The drama’s done)

And because I landed (or drowned?) at forty, here’s Ahab, near the end of the novel, wailing on forty:

Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years ago!—ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye, aye! what a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now?

(I feel richer now after the re-read.)