Why Read Moby-Dick? (2011)
Why Read Moby-Dick?
“12 Is There a Heaven?
To love and work and be happy in this life is to refrain from focusing on what awaits us and everyone we care about: decay and death, at least in this world. The curse of being human is to realize that it all ends and can do so at any moment. To acknowledge and internalize this truth in an unmediated way is to go, like Ahab, insane.
Some people don’t think about death very much, if at all. Since there’s nothing they can do about it, why worry about it? Not Melville. Judgin...g from his letters to Hawthorne and his writings throughout his life, he thought about it all the time. The belief that death was the end, that we are utterly and truly annihilated when we die, was not something he could easily accept. He desperately needed to know there is a heaven.
In the beginning of the book, Ishmael is confident that eternity will be waiting for him no matter what happens down here on Earth. He may be crushed by a whale, but not even God can stave his immortal soul. Even before the Pequod sets sail, however, he has begun to wonder whether this is entirely true.MoreLess
To love and work and be happy in this life is to refrain from focusing on what awaits us and everyone we care about: decay and death, at least in this world. The curse of being human is to realize that it all ends and can do so at any moment. To acknowledge and internalize this truth in an unmediated way is to go, like Ahab, insane.
Some people don’t think about death very much, if at all. Since there’s nothing they can do about it, why worry about it? Not Melville. Judgin...g from his letters to Hawthorne and his writings throughout his life, he thought about it all the time. The belief that death was the end, that we are utterly and truly annihilated when we die, was not something he could easily accept. He desperately needed to know there is a heaven.
In the beginning of the book, Ishmael is confident that eternity will be waiting for him no matter what happens down here on Earth. He may be crushed by a whale, but not even God can stave his immortal soul. Even before the Pequod sets sail, however, he has begun to wonder whether this is entirely true.MoreLess
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