by Leanne Ogasawara

1.

Maybe this is something that happens when you reach a certain age?

But lately, I’ve found myself yearning to revisit things like paintings and books. Ones I loved when I was young. Like standing before Raphael’s Madonna del Cardellino in the Uffizi again. I was nineteen when I first saw the picture. Viewing it again thirty years later, I asked myself: How has the painting changed? How has the viewer changed? Am I even the same woman now? Or maybe it is the world that has moved on….

It was not long after seeing the Raphael that I first read Moby Dick. A philosophy major at Berkeley, I read Melville’s novel in a class taught by world-renown Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus. The class, was called “Man, God, and Society in Western Literature” and Moby Dick was the last work on the syllabus, after reading Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Indeed, it was the culmination of the class.

The greatest book of American literature ever written, Professor Dreyfus told us this again and again.

Call me Ishmael.

God, I loved that first sentence… But it was the rest of that opening paragraph that really grabbed and shook me.  That same one about which Ta-Nehisi Coates judged to be “the greatest paragraph in any work of fiction at any point, in all of history. And not just human history, but galactic and extraterrestrial history too…” Here it is:

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

The words exert the same power over my imagination now as they did back then when I was nineteen. Re-reading the novel this year, as I am also consulting several other books about Moby Dick, I learned that nowadays people consider that Ishmael was depressed and maybe even suicidal during that dark and drizzly November of his soul.

But back when I was nineteen, I didn’t think of it like that.  Read more »