Latest / The Data Shaman Podcast - Quant Mind, Shaman Soul / Season 3, Ep 3 - The ADHD Book Club: Moby-Dick

Transcript

Season 3, Ep 3 - The ADHD Book Club: Moby-Dick · The Data Shaman Podcast - Quant Mind, Shaman Soul

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you have ADHD, you probably have a pile of books you mean to read.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I know I have lots of them.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: And every one of them comes with a small dose of guild.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: My pile has been growing larger.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: For years I thought the problem was me.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sitting alone in silence with 900 pages in a way of working built for someone else's brain.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I built one that fits mine.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: I turned the books into conversations.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Two imaginests, Professor Clara Benedict, a literature scholar, and Dr.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Theomarsh, a clinical psychologist, who talk a book through slowly with my good friend who would over dinner.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I remember a conversation far better than a page.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And this is my way of sharing them with you.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: I am Daniela Forni, and this is the Little Shaman Podcast.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Some books people carry around like a dare.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Moby Dick is the biggest dare of all.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's long, it is low, and with a whole chapter about rope.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: A sea captain, a white whale, and an obsession big enough to pull a whole ship down with it.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: But underneath the adventure, it is a book about something closer to home.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when a person builds an entire identity around a single wound?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Today Moby Dick by Hona Melville.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Let us begin.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: Part one Starting From Nothing I should confess something before we begin.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: I have never read Moby Dick.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: I have carried the guilt of that for about twenty years.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: I know there is a whale, and I know there is a captain with a wooden leg.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I know the first line, because everyone knows the first line.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: Call me Ishmael.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: Call me Ishmael.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's the whole of my knowledge.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: So treat me as a complete beginner.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: Pretend I know nothing.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_03: That's the best possible way to come to it, honestly.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_03: People who feel they should have read it tend to tiptoe around it like it's a cathedral.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: It isn't a cathedral.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_03: It's a big, strange, funny, frightening, overstuffed book about men on a boat, and underneath the boat there is everything a person can feel.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: Then let's start with the plainest possible question.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: What is it?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: If you had to tell me the story in the time it takes to boil a kettle.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: A young man with no money and a heavy heart decides to go to sea on a whaling ship.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: The ship is called the Pequod.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: The captain is a man named Ahab.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_03: Years ago, a particular whale, an enormous white one, known to sailors as Moby Dick, bit off Ahab's leg.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_03: And Ahab has decided that he will sail the whole world over if he has to, to find that one whale and kill it.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_03: The crew signed up to hunt whales for oil, for money, for a living.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: What they slowly realize is that they have actually signed up for one man's private war of revenge.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_03: And the book is the story of that voyage, told by the one young man who lives to tell it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: So the whale took his leg, and he wants the whale dead.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's a revenge story.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: That part I understand instantly.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: A man is hurt, a man wants to hurt back.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's the engine of it, yes.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: But hold that thought because the most interesting thing in the whole book is the gap between a man is hurt and wants to hurt back, which anyone understands, and what actually happens inside Ahab, which is something much stranger and much sadder.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_03: The book is really an x-ray of that gap.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_03: When was it written?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_03: I want to place it.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: Published in 1851 by an American writer named Herman Melville.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: And here's a detail I love.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_03: It was a commercial failure.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_03: It confused people, it sold poorly.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: Melville's career never really recovered, and he died decades later, more or less forgotten.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_03: The book we now treat as the great American novel was, in his own lifetime, the thing that ended him.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't until the 1920s, long after he was dead, that people went back and realized what he'd made.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's almost unbearable.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: He wrote the masterpiece and never got to know it was one.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_03: It happens more than you'd think.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: But it tells you something about the book, too.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: It was ahead of the emotional vocabulary people had in 1851.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's a psychological novel written before most of the psychology existed.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_03: Melville is reaching for ideas about obsession, trauma, the unconscious, the way a group can be pulled into one man's madness.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_03: And he has almost no scientific language for any of it.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: So he does it through a whale hunt.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's why you wanted to do this one with me, isn't it?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's secretly about the mind.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's not even that secret.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_03: But yes.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: Let's actually begin where the book begins.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_03: Because the opening is a piece of psychology in itself.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_04: Part two.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_04: The famous line.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: Why is it famous?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_03: It's just three words.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's famous partly because it's so plain and so odd at the same time.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: He doesn't say, My name is Ishmael.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_03: He says, Call me Ishmael.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_03: Call me.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: As if the name is a choice, a mask he's putting on for you.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_03: We never learn much about who he really is.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_03: He's offering you a handle to hold him by, not a full disclosure.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: As a clinician, that would make my ears prick up.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: Someone who introduces themselves by an alias, essentially, and tells you almost nothing about their past.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's a person keeping something at arm's length.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: And listen to what he tells you next, because this is where you'll feel right at home.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: He explains why he's going to see.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_03: And the reason is not adventure or money, the reason is his state of mind.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_03: I'll paraphrase closely.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: He says, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, whenever I find myself pausing in front of coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_03: And especially whenever my low mood gets 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 know it is high time to get to see.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: Wait, go back.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: A damp, drizzly November in my soul.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's depression.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's a man describing low grade chronic depression in 1851, before the word meant what it means to us.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_03: That's exactly what it is.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_03: And he goes further.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_03: He says this is his substitute for pistol and ball for suicide.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_03: He says more or less that going to sea is how he keeps himself from ending his life.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: Cato threw himself on his sword.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_03: I quietly take to the ship.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_03: That's the register.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_03: This is a man telling you in the first paragraph that he goes to the ocean instead of killing himself.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: So the whole adventure starts from despair.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: He's not running toward the whale.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: He's running away from the edge of something.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, and I think that framing matters for the entire book.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_03: We tend to remember Moby Dick as this huge, masculine epic of the hunt, but it opens with a quiet, depressed young man telling you that the sea is his medicine.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_03: He even says there's something in the water itself that draws troubled people.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_03: He talks about how on any Sunday in the city you'll see crowds of men standing at the very edge of the docks, staring out at the water as if pulled there.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_03: Meditation and water are wedded forever, he says.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: That observation is sharp, actually.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: There is something regulating about water for a dysregulated mind.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: The horizon, the rhythm, the vastness that makes your own troubles feel smaller.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: We'd now talk about it in terms of the nervous system settling.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: He's noticing a real thing.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: He's self-medicating with the ocean.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: And notice the structure of his coping.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_03: It's not I feel bad, so I'll sit with it.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's I feel bad, so I will put my body somewhere demanding and let hard physical work and a new world crowd the feeling out.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_03: One man holds his pain and studies it.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_03: But the book is, in a way, those two options standing side by side.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's a beautiful frame.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: The observer and the possessed.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_03: And the observer is the one who survives.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_03: We'll come back to that.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_04: Part three Kuiqueg, or how a stranger stops being frightening.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: He's decided to go to sea.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: What actually happens first?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: Does he just walk onto the ship?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_03: And the first real event of the book is one of my favorite pieces of psychology in all of literature.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_03: And it's basically a comedy.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_03: Ishmael travels to a whaling town, New Bedford, to find a ship.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's winter, the town is packed, and he goes to a cheap inn called the Spouter Inn.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's so crowded that the landlord tells him the only bed left is one he'll have to share, with a harpooner who's out at the moment.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_03: Ishmael is uneasy, but agrees, and then he wakes up, increasingly nervous, for this stranger he's going to sleep next to.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: And the stranger is The stranger is Quiqueg, a harpooner from a fictional South Pacific Island, the son of a chief.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_03: He is heavily tattooed over his whole body and face.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_03: He's dark skinned, he carries a tomahawk pipe and a little idol.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_03: And the detail Ishmael fixes on in horror, he comes in late at night carrying a shrunken, embalmed human head that he's been trying to sell around town.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: This is almost to the letter how prejudice works psychologically.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Fear of the outsider is very often just fear of the unknown wearing a costume.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: The mind treats, I can't predict this person as this person is dangerous.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: Those are not the same thing, but under threat, they collapse into one.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_03: And watch how fast it dissolves, because this is the hopeful part.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_03: Once they actually talk, once the landlord explains, once Quiquag is startled to find a stranger in his bed and they sort it out, the whole thing evaporates.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: By morning, Ishmael wakes up with Quiquag's tattooed arm thrown over him in the most loving and affectionate manner, he says, as if Ishmael were his wife.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_03: And within a day or two, they are devoted friends.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: Ishmael says he felt a melting in himself, that no longer were there any splintered heart and maddened hand turned against the world.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_03: This soothing savage had redeemed it.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: So the cure for his November soul isn't actually the ocean.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's the friendship.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_03: Now you're reading it like Melville.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_03: The depression that opens the book begins to lift not when he gets to see, but when he's genuinely known by another person.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: There's a line where Ishmael reflects that he'd rather sleep next to a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: He's puncturing his own prejudice, laughing at who he was two pages ago.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: What strikes me is the speed and the completeness of the reversal.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: He goes from this man will murder me to a bond he describes in the language of marriage.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: In psychology, we talk about the contact hypothesis.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: The finding that contact between groups under the right conditions reduces prejudice.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: But the right conditions usually include things like equal status, a shared goal, getting to actually cooperate.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: And look, that's precisely what the book gives them.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: They're about to be equals on a ship, dependent on each other for their lives with a common task.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_03: And Melville is doing it on purpose.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_03: He keeps staging these moments where Quequeg turns out to be braver, kinder, and more honorable than the civilized Christians around him.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: There's a scene on the boat to Nantucket where a lout has been mocking Quequeg, and then that same lout gets knocked overboard, and Quequeg is the one who dives in without hesitation to save him.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_03: Melville is quietly dismantling his narrators and his readers' assumptions about who the savage really is.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: Can I name the thing that moves me about this?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's that the book's answer to despair, right at the start, is attachment.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: A lonely, half suicidal man is pulled back toward life by being held.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: Literally, that arm over him in the morning, by someone he'd been taught to fear.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's not a small idea dressed up as a whale book.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's one of the truest things we know about human beings.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: Isolation is the soil despair grows in, and connection is the thing that interrupts it.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: And keep Quequeg in mind because he comes back at the very end in a way that will give you chills.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: The friendship that saves Ishmael's spirit at the beginning is going to save his life at the end.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_03: Melville plays a very long game.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_04: An interlude.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: Before we leave Dryland, you mentioned there's a sermon early on.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: A chapter in a chapel?
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: Does it matter, or can a beginner skip it?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: Don't skip it.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's short and it's doing something sly.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: Before the voyage in New Bedford, Ishmael and Quequeg go to a seaman's chapel, a little church for whalers, its walls covered in memorial tablets to men lost at sea.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: And the preacher is a weathered old former harpooner named Father Maple, who climbs up into a high pulpit shaped like the prow of a ship, using a rope ladder that he then pulls up after himself, as if cutting himself off from the world to speak.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: And what does he preach?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_03: He preaches the story of Jonah, the man in the Bible who's told by God to go and do something and refuses, and runs away by ship, and is thrown overboard in a storm and swallowed by a great fish, a whale, and lives for three days in its belly, and finally repents and is delivered.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_03: And Mapple's sermon is all about one thing submission, about how Jonah's salvation came only when he stopped running from what he was called to do and surrendered, when he gave up his own will and obeyed.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_03: The whole thrust of it is the hard road, the saving road, is to bend your own will to something higher than yourself.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: Ah.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so Melville plants right at the start the exact opposite of what Ahab is going to do.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_03: That's precisely the trick.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_03: The sermon gives you the correct answer submission, humility, bending the will, as a theme, stated out loud at the very beginning.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: And then the entire rest of the book is the story of a man who does the reverse.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab is the anti-Jonah.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_03: Jonah is swallowed by the whale and saved by submitting.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab chases the whale and is destroyed by refusing to submit to the loss, to his fate, to the limits of a human life.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: Melville lets you hear the sermon so that eight hundred pages later, you understand exactly what Ahab is defying.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's a clever bit of architecture, psychologically.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: He gives you the healthy template first surrender, acceptance, bending to what's larger than you, in a form you'll half forget, a dusty church sermon.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: And then he makes you spend the whole book inside the thrilling, magnificent, doomed alternative, so that the sermon only fully detonates in your memory at the end.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: You don't experience it as a lesson, you experience it as a seed.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: And notice how Melville complicates even the correct answer.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: Mapwalk pulls the ladder up after himself.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_03: He cuts himself off to preach submission.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: There's something austere.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: And lonely in it.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_03: Melville never makes virtue cozy.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: He shows you that surrender is hard, that it costs something, that it's not the easy or obvious path, which is exactly why Ahab can't take it.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_03: The defiant road feels grand and alive.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: The road of acceptance looks from the outside like defeat.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_03: The whole tragedy turns on mistaking the one for the other.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: Submission looking like defeat and defiance looking like strength when it's the other way around.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's not a seventeenth century theological problem.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's Tuesday afternoon in my office.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's the human problem.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: Melville just gave it a whale.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_04: Part four.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_04: Boarding the Pequad and a Captain Who Won't Come Out of his cabin.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: So the two friends sign on to this ship, the Pequod.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me about the ship itself.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: Does it matter or is it just the setting?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: With Melville, nothing is just the setting.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: The Pequad is named after a Native American people who were nearly wiped out in a colonial war.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: So the ship carries a name haunted by extinction before it even leaves port.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's an old ship, weathered, decorated with whale teeth and bone, almost a living thing.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_03: Ishmael signs the papers with two of the ship's owners, a pair of old Quakers named Peleg and Bildad, who haggle comically over his pay.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of warmth and humor in these early chapters.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_03: And the captain?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: When do we meet him?
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: This is the master stroke.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_03: We don't.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: Not for a long time.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: The ship is being readied, the crew is coming aboard, and Ahab simply does not appear.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: He stays shut in his cabin.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_03: People refer to him in lowered voices.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: One strange, ragged man on the dock, a figure called Elijah, named after the prophet, accosts Ishmael and Quequeg and hints darkly that they don't know what they've signed up for.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_03: That something is wrong with Ahab.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_03: That something happened to his soul off Cape Horn.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_03: And then he wanders off.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_03: So before we ever see Ahab, the book fills the air around him with dread.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very deliberate piece of stagecraft, withholding him.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: By the time he appears, I'll have built him up in my own imagination into something enormous.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_03: Which is itself one of the book's themes, how we build enormous figures out of absence and rumor.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_03: But yes, as a technique, it's masterful.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_03: And then finally, days into the voyage, Ahab appears on deck.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: And Ishmael's description is unforgettable.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: He says, Ahab looked like a man cut away from the stake, a man made of solid bronze, with a vivid white scar running down his face and neck.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_03: Some said it ran the whole length of his body.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: And instead of one leg, he stands braced on a prosthetic leg carved from the polished jawbone of a whale.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: There's a hole drilled into the deck where he sockets that ivory leg so he can stand steady in the wind.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: The whalebone leg.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: So the thing that maimed him is also the thing he now stands on.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: He's walking on the material of his enemy.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_03: You caught in one sentence something scholars have written essays about.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: He is literally supported by whale.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_03: His wound and his footing are made of the same substance.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_03: Melville is telling you before Ahab says a word that this man's injury and his identity have fused.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: He cannot stand without being reminded of what happened to him.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_03: Every step is the wound.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's a devastating image, clinically, because that's what unprocessed trauma does.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: It stops being an event that happened in the past and becomes the ground you stand on in the present.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have the injury.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: The injury has you.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: And it holds you up and you can't walk without it.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_03: Say more about that, because I think it's the center of the book.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, think about what a healthy relationship to a terrible event looks like.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: Something awful happens to you.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: Over time, painfully, it becomes part of your story.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: This happened to me.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: It changed me.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: I carry it.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: The event takes its place in the past tense.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_02: You can look at it, it's behind you, even though it's in you.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's roughly what we'd call integration or working through.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: And Ahab hasn't done that.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: Ahab has done the opposite.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: For Ahab, the event is not in the past tense.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: It is happening now, continuously, and it will keep happening until he does something about it.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: The whale didn't take his leg years ago.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: The whale is taking his leg every single morning when he straps that bone on.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: There's a kind of person who cannot let a wound become a scar, who keeps it an open wound on purpose.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: Because the open wound gives their life a shape and a purpose that healing would take away.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: Oh that's good.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: The wound as purpose.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: We see versions of it constantly, in smaller keys.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_02: The person whose entire identity organizes around the injustice done to them.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: The grudge that's been nursed for so long it's become the person's main relationship.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: At first the grievance serves the person.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: It explains their pain, it gives them someone to blame, it gives them a reason to get up.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then somewhere along the line it flips, and the person starts serving the grievance.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: They can't put it down because they no longer know who they'd be without it.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's Ahab.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: He is a man entirely in service to his own wound.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_04: Part five The Quarter Deck and the Moment a crew is captured.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: So when does the crew find out that this isn't a normal whaling trip?
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_03: There's a single electrifying scene, and it's the hinge of the whole novel.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: One day, Ahab calls the entire crew to assemble on the quarter deck, the raised deck at the back of the ship, and he puts on a performance.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_03: I use that word carefully because it is theater, and he knows it.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_03: He starts pacing, he gets them worked up, he asks them ritual questions.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_03: What do you do when you see a whale?
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_03: And how do you row and so on?
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_03: And he gets them shouting answers back louder and louder, like a call and response, like a revival meeting.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's warming them up, getting their bodies involved, getting them chanting.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_03: Then he produces a gold coin, a Spanish doubloon, a big bright gold piece, and he nails it to the mainmast in front of everyone.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_03: And he announces, whoever first sights a particular white headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw, a whale named Moby Dick, that man gets this gold.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_03: And the crew catches fire.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_03: They don't even fully know yet what they're agreeing to.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_03: They're roaring.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_03: And in that heat, Ahab reveals the truth.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_03: This whale is the one that took his leg.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: And this, not oil, not money, is the real purpose of the voyage.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: Let me slow this down, because what you've just described is step by step almost a textbook of how one person captures a group.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: May I?
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: Please.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_03: This is exactly why I wanted you here.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: First, he gathers everyone physically together.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_02: So each man is in a crowd.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: In a crowd, individual judgment gets quieter, and the mood of the group gets louder.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: People feel and do things in a crowd they'd never feel or do alone.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: Second, he gets their bodies moving in unison.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: The call and response, the shouting.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: Synchronized action bonds people and lowers their critical guard.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's why armies march and congregations sing.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: Third, he attaches a shining symbol, the gold coin, nailed up where everyone can see it every single day.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: Now the obsession has an icon.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_02: Fourth, he gives them a concrete enemy with a name and a face.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: Not the dangers of the sea.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: Moby Dick, a specific villain.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_02: A named enemy is a gift to a crowd.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: It turns formless fear into focused hate, which feels much better.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: And fifth, he fuses his private wound to their shared adventure.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: So that his revenge feels like their quest.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_03: And it works completely.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_03: Only one man on that deck keeps his head.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: The first mate.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_03: Starbuck.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_03: Remember the name.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, the coffee chain is named after him.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_03: Starbuck is the first mate, a sober, religious, deeply decent Quaker, a family man with a wife and child back home.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_03: And in the middle of all this fervor, Starbuck speaks up.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_03: He says, more or less, I came here to hunt whales for my living, not to chase my commander's revenge.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_03: How many barrels of oil will your vengeance bring us?
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_03: It won't even fetch much in the Nantucket market.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_03: He's trying to call everyone back to reason, to the actual job, to proportion.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: And Ahab's answer is extraordinary.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_03: He doesn't argue the economics, he soars above them.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_03: He says that all visible objects are like masks, pasteboard masks, and that behind every visible thing there is some unknown but reasoning force.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_03: And the whale, to him, is the mask of that force.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_03: He tasks me, he heaps me, Ahab says of the whale.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_03: He talks about striking through the mask.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_03: He says even if the whale is just a dumb brute that acted out of blind instinct, he will still hate it.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_03: I will wreak that hate upon him.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_03: He out talks Starbuck not with better reasons, but with a bigger, darker vision.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_03: And Starbuck falls silent.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: That silence is one of the most important moments in the book, isn't it?
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: The sane man sees exactly what's happening.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_02: Names it correctly.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: This is madness.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: This is one man's private grief swallowing all of our lives.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: And then he goes quiet and lets it happen.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_03: What happens to Starbuck?
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_03: That is the question that haunts the rest of the novel.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_03: What would you say happens to him as a psychologist?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: A few things at once, I'd guess.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: One, Ahab holds legitimate authority.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: He's the captain.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: Every structure Starbuck has ever trusted tells him to obey the captain.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: Defying that isn't just scary, it feels wrong, like a violation of the order of things, even when the captain is the one who's gone wrong.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: We massively underestimate how hot it is for a conscientious, rule respecting person to disobey a legitimate authority.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: The famous obedience experiments showed ordinary people will do appalling things when an authority figure simply keeps insisting.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: Two, Starbuck is outnumbered.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: He looked around and saw the whole crew roaring.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: The lone dissenter in a unanimous crowd feels enormous pressure to doubt himself.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe I'm the one who's wrong.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_02: Three, Ahab reframed the whole thing onto a plane where Starbuck's practical objections looked small and cowardly.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_02: Starbuck came with barrels and markets.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_02: Ahab answered with the mask of the universe.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: Starbuck is made to feel like a bookkeeper quibbling in a cathedral.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_03: And he never recovers his footing.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: For the rest of the book, Starbuck is tortured by the knowledge that this voyage is doomed and wrong, and he is never quite able to act on it.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_03: There's a late scene, we'll get there, where he comes very close.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: I already find him the most human person in the book.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: Because most of us are Starbuck.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_02: We're not the madman and we're not the oblivious crowd.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_02: We're the person who can see that something is wrong in a company, in a family, in a country, and who feels the words die in our throat, and who tells ourselves it isn't our place, or that we must be missing something, or that surely someone else will stop it.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_02: The tragedy of Starbuck is the tragedy of the decent bystander.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_03: Melville gives him everything conscience, intelligence, courage, even, everything except the final ability to break the frame he's been placed in.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_04: And that failure costs every life on the ship.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_04: Part six The Whale as a blank screen.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: I want to go back to something Ahab said, because it's been nagging at me.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: The pasteboard masks.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: He says the whale is a mask over some reasoning force, and he wants to strike through it.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's not really about a whale anymore, is it?
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's about something much bigger.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's not about a whale.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: And this is the part of the book that turns it from a great adventure story into something stranger and deeper.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_03: The question the whole novel circles is what is Moby Dick, actually?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_03: And the unsettling answer is that nobody can say, and that every character sees something different in it.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_03: Different how?
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_03: There's a whole chapter, one of the most famous, called The Whiteness of the Whale.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_03: Ishmael tries to explain why the whale's whiteness specifically is so horrifying to him, and he struggles, because whiteness is usually associated with purity, innocence, the good.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_03: But he circles around this idea that white is also the color of blankness, of absence, of a void.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_03: Snowfields, ghosts, the blind milky eye, the dead.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_03: He says whiteness terrifies because it is a colorless all color.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_03: It's emptiness that could mean anything, and therefore means nothing you can hold on to.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_03: The horror of the white whale is partly the horror of a universe that shows you a blank face.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_02: Now that is a profound psychological idea, and I want to make sure the reader catches it, because it's the opposite of what you'd expect.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: The terror isn't that the whale is evil.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_02: The terror is that the whale might be nothing.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: Blank, indifferent, meaningless.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: And human beings, it turns out, can hardly bear meaninglessness.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_02: We would almost rather be hated than ignored by the universe.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_03: Say why?
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_03: Because I think this is the key that unlocks Ahab.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_02: Because our minds are built to find agents and intentions everywhere.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_02: We're pattern detectors and facefinders by nature.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: We see faces in clouds, we see purpose in random events.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: We say everything happens for a reason at funerals.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's deep wiring.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: When something terrible happens to us, the mind desperately wants it to mean something, to have been done by someone for a reason.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_02: Because an intended wound, however awful, lives in a world that makes sense.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: A world with agents, motives, moral shape.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: A meaningless wound lives in a world that doesn't care whether you exist.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that second world is, for many people, simply unendurable.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_03: So when the whale takes Ahab's leg.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: The whale, in reality, is an animal.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_02: It bit a man because the man was trying to kill it.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: There's no malice in it any more than there's malice in a wave that drowns someone.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's just the blind, indifferent working of nature.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that, not the pain, not the lost leg, is the thing Ahab cannot survive.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: He cannot live in a universe where his catastrophe was meaningless.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: So he does something almost magnificent and completely destructive.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_02: He assigns the meaning himself.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_02: He decides the whale is not a blind animal, but the deliberate agent of a malicious power, the mask of some reasoning thing that hates him.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_02: He would rather face a cosmic enemy than an empty sky.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_02: The revenge gives the wound a meaning.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_02: The hunt gives his shattered life a plot.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_03: And Melville makes the blank screen idea almost literal in another chapter I adore.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_03: Remember the gold debloon nailed to the mast?
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_03: Late in the book, Melville has one character after another walk up to that same coin and look at it, and he tells us what each man sees in it.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_03: The coin has symbols stamped on it, mountains, a sun, a rooster, signs of the zodiac.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab looks at it and sees himself.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_03: The peaks and the fire are all Ahab, all about his own struggle.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_03: Starbuck looks at it and sees a religious lesson, a reminder of God.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_03: Stubb, the jolly second mate, looks at it and sees a baudy joke and a comment on the cycle of life.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_03: The cabin boy, Pip, who by then has lost his mind, looks at it and babbles something that sounds like nonsense and is actually the most piercing thing of all.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_03: Same coin, same marks of gold, completely different meanings, one per man.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's a perfect little demonstration of projection.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's the word for it in psychology, though I'll use it loosely.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_02: We take what's inside us, our fears, our wishes, our preoccupations, and we cast it outward onto a blank or ambiguous object.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then we experience it as if it were a property of the object.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_02: The men aren't really seeing the coin, they're seeing themselves, reflected off a gold surface.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_02: And the whale is the same, just enormous.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: The white whale is a coin the size of the sea.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_02: Each man and each reader reads his own terror into it.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_03: Which is why the book has been read as being about God, about nature, about evil, about America, about the Father, about the unknowable itself.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: Melville built an object precisely blank enough to hold all of it.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_03: That's not vagueness, that's the subject.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_03: The book is about the human compulsion to pour meaning into the blank.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: And the warning inside it is clear.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: Even if Melville never states it as a warning, the meaning you pour into the blank is yours.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: It comes from you.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_02: Ahab's whale is Ahab's rage with a body wrapped around it.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: When he hunts the whale, he thinks he's hunting an external evil, but he's really chasing his own refusal to accept what happened to him.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_02: He will cross the entire ocean to avoid turning around and facing the one thing he can't face, that sometimes the universe simply hurts you.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: And there is no one to punish.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_02: And you have to grieve and go on anyway.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_03: You have to grieve and go on anyway.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab would rather die than do that.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: And he does.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_02: We're heading toward that, aren't we?
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: We are, but there are two more people I can't let us skip, because they're where Melville hides his heart.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_04: An interlude.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_04: A word for the obsession and a warning not to stare.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_02: Can I ask about a word?
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_02: You used it earlier, monomania.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_02: You said Melville reaches for ideas about obsession before the science existed.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_02: Was monomania a real term or his invention?
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_03: It was a real and quite fashionable medical term in Melville's day.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_03: Early 19th century alienists, the first psychiatrists, used monomania to describe a mind that was sane in every respect except one, a single idea around which the whole personality had deranged, while everything else stayed lucid.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_03: And Melville uses the exact word for Ahab.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_03: He says, Ahab's madness is not a general raving.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab is, in most ways, a brilliant, functioning, even masterful ship's captain.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_03: The derangement is concentrated into a single point, the whale.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_03: Everything else about him still works.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_03: That's what makes him so frightening and so persuasive.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_02: That detail is psychologically crucial, and I'm glad the book gets it right, because it's the thing people most misunderstand about obsession.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: We picture the obsessed person as globally crazy, wild-eyed, incoherent, but the most dangerous obsessions sit inside a mind that is otherwise sharp, competent, even charming.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: The person reasons beautifully.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_02: They just reason beautifully in service of the one fixed idea.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: Ahab isn't stupid.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_02: His intelligence has been captured and put to work for the obsession.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's why Starbuck can't outargue him.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_02: The full force of a first-rate mind is defending the delusion.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_02: Obsession doesn't lower your intelligence, it conscripts it.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_03: And Melville gives you one unforgettable scene that works as a warning about this, about what happens if you let yourself gaze too long into the thing that burns.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's called the Triworks.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_03: On a whaling ship, when they've killed a whale, they boil its blubber down into oil in huge iron pots set over a furnace on the deck.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_03: The Triworks.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_03: And at night, this furnace roars, a great fire blazing on the ocean in the dark, with the flames lighting up the half-naked harpooners feeding it, red light, black smoke, the whole ship turned into something hellish and hypnotic.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_02: I can picture it.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_02: A furnace burning on the sea at midnight.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_03: And one night Ishmael is at the helm, steering the ship, and he's been staring into this fire for a long time, mesmerized by it, and he falls into a kind of trance.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_03: And he loses his orientation.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_03: He turns around, still half dreaming, facing the fire, and for a terrifying moment he's completely disoriented.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_03: He's forgotten which way the ship is going.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_03: His hands are moving the tiller the wrong way, and he nearly capsizes the entire ship.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_03: Nearly turns her over in the dark because he'd been hypnotized by staring into the flame.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_03: He catches himself just in time in a jolt of panic.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: And Melville draws the lesson out explicitly?
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_03: He does, almost as direct advice.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_03: He warns, turn not thy back to the compass.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_03: Do not be seduced by the artificial fire that makes everything look lurid and demonic.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: Believe in the natural light of the sun, not the hellfire of the furnace.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_03: He says roughly that there is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness, and a man can gaze so long into the darkness and the fire that he loses the way back.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_03: It's a warning against doing exactly what Ahab does, staring so long and so hard into your own burning grievance that you lose your bearings entirely and steer everyone into the dark.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's a remarkably precise piece of psychological self-help buried in a wailing chapter, because it names a real mechanism.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_02: The thing you attend to, you amplify.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_02: If you spend every night staring into the fire of your wound, rehearsing the injustice, feeding the grievance, letting the lurid light of it color everything, then eventually the firelight becomes the only light you can see by, and the ordinary daylight world starts to look pale and unreal by comparison.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_02: Ahab has been staring into that fire for years.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: By the time we meet him, the furnace is his son.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_02: He genuinely cannot see the world by any other light.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_02: And Ishmael's near disaster at the helm is Melville telling you this can happen to anyone who gazes too long.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_02: The difference between Ishmael and Ahab is just that Ishmael caught himself, jolted awake, and turned back toward the compass.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the hope folded into the warning.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_03: You can catch yourself, you can turn back toward the natural light.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_03: The tragedy of Ahab is a man who could have, at a hundred moments, turned back toward the compass and chose the fire every time.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_04: Part seven.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_04: Pip, the boy who drowns without dying.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned Pip, the cabin boy who goes mad.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_03: Tell me about him.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_03: Pip is a small black boy, the youngest and gentlest soul on the ship, who works as a kind of cabin attendant.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_03: He's timid, he's sweet, he's not a hardened whaleman.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_03: And at one point he's pressed into a whale boat, one of the small rowing boats they lower to actually chase a whale.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_03: And in the terror of the chase, he panics and jumps overboard into the open sea.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_03: The first time they haul him back and scold him.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_03: The second time he jumps, the boat is fast to a whale and can't turn back for him.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_03: And so they leave him.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_03: They leave him alone, a tiny head bobbing in the middle of the ocean, with the ship far off for what must have felt like an eternity until they finally come back around and pick him up.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_03: How long is he out there?
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_03: Long enough.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_03: And here's Melville's description of what it did to him.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_03: And it's one of the most precise descriptions of psychological trauma I know, again written before the vocabulary existed.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_03: He says the sea mockingly kept Pip's body afloat, but drowned the infinite of his soul.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_03: Pip saw, Melville says, the vast, indifferent bottom of the world.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_03: He saw how tiny a single human life is against that immensity.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_03: And he came back, not the same.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_03: The ship's crew called it madness.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_03: Melville says heaven's sense would call it something else, that Pip had been carried down alive to wondrous depths and had seen things that shattered the ordinary mind.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_02: So the abandonment in the ocean breaks him.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_02: He comes back dissociated elsewhere, not fully present, speaking in riddles, his personality scattered.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_02: And what you're describing is exactly the signature of a certain kind of trauma.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just the fear of dying, it's the specific horror of total aloneness, of being abandoned in a vast, indifferent space where nothing is coming to save you and your existence counts for nothing.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's an annihilating experience.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_02: The body survives and something in the self doesn't.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_03: And here's the turn that I find almost unbearably moving.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_03: Who on that whole ship of hard men is the one who takes the broken boy in?
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_03: Who becomes tender with Pip?
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab, the one man consumed by his own monomania, the man who's treated his entire crew as tools for his revenge.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_03: He's the one who takes Pip by the hand, keeps the boy in his own cabin, and speaks to him with a gentleness he shows no one else.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_03: He says things to Pip like, Thou touchest my inmost center.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_03: He says the boy's madness has cured him of something, or spoken to something in him.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_02: Because the madman recognizes the madman.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: Of course.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_02: Ahab sees in Pip a soul that's been down to the same terrible depths he's been to, that's looked into the indifferent void and been unmade by it.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone else on the ship is still living in the ordinary daylight world where things make sense.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_02: Only Pip has been where Ahab lives.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so, paradoxically, the most isolated man on the ship finds his one moment of genuine tenderness with the one other person who's seen what he's seen.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_03: It tells you Ahab isn't a monster.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: That's the thing people miss if they only know the cartoon of the book.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab is capable of love.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_03: He has a wife and young child at home that he mentions with real tenderness.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_03: There's a late, quiet scene where he weeps a single tear into the sea and tells Starbuck about his wife and boy, about the forty years he spent at sea, about his loneliness.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_03: The horror of Ahab isn't that he's evil, it's that he's a feeling, grieving, even loving man who has handed the steering of his whole soul over to one fixed idea, and cannot take it back, even when some part of him wants to.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's far more frightening than a villain.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_02: A villain you can simply oppose.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_02: Ahab is a warning about what can happen to a good man who won't grieve.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_02: And the tear is the tell.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_02: The part of him that could still turn back is in there, alive, weeping.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_02: He just can't reach it.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_04: Part eight.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_04: Fidalah Prophecy and the Near Mutiny.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_02: You also mentioned a figure, Fidala, who prophesies?
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_03: Fidalah is a mysterious man, described as a Parsi, a Zoroastrian, whom Ahab has secretly brought aboard with a small crew of his own, hidden at first, to man his personal whale boat.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_03: He's a shadowy, almost supernatural presence, and he gives Ahab a set of prophecies, the way the witches do in Macbeth.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_03: He tells Ahab, in riddling terms, that Ahab will see two particular hearses on the sea before he dies, and that hemp alone can kill him, meaning rope, meaning the hangman's noose, which Ahab takes to mean he's essentially invincible, because how would a noose find him in the middle of the ocean?
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_02: Ah.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_02: So the prophecy comforts him by sounding impossible and then comes true in a way he didn't foresee.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's the oldest shape of prophecy there is.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_03: The Macbeth machine.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_03: Every reassuring impossibility turns out to have a literal, deadly fulfillment.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_03: And psychologically, what's interesting is how much Ahab wants to believe it, how it feeds his sense that he's a man of destiny, chosen, faded, moving on rails toward a cosmic appointment.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_03: The prophecy flatters the very thing that's killing him.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_03: The idea that this isn't a choice he's making, but a fate he's fulfilling.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's a crucial self-deception, and we should name it plainly for the reader, because it's one we all use.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_02: Ahab keeps telling himself, and everyone else, that he can't help it, that he's faded, that something outside him is driving the ship, that he's not responsible.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_02: There's a line where he cries out, What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing commands me against all human loving and longing?
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_02: Is Ahab Ahab?
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_02: Is it I, God, or who that lifts this arm?
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_02: He's asking essentially, Am I even doing this, or is something doing it through me?
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_03: And what do you make of that question?
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_03: Because it's the philosophical heart of the book, Free Will Against Fate.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think Melville is being very honest and very double about it.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_02: On one hand, Ahab genuinely feels driven, and that feeling is real.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_02: Obsession genuinely does feel like being ridden by something, like your own will has been taken out of your hands.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_02: Anyone who's been in the grip of a compulsion, an addiction, a consuming rage, knows that uncanny sense of watching yourself do the thing you swore you wouldn't.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, and this is the moral sting, the feeling of being fated is also the most convenient possible excuse.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_02: I couldn't help it.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_02: It was destiny.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_02: Something made me.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_02: That story lets Ahab off the hook for every life he's spending.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_02: The book never fully resolves whether Ahab is a victim of fate or the author of his own doom.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's deliberate.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_02: Because in a real human life, those two are braided together so tightly you can't pull them apart.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_02: We are, at the same time, driven by forces we didn't choose and responsible for what we do with them.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_03: And the moment where that tension becomes almost intolerable is Starbuck and the musket.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_03: May I tell it?
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_03: Please.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_03: Late in the voyage, one night, Starbuck has to go to the captain's cabin on some errand.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_03: And he sees, racked on the wall, the loaded muskets, including the very musket that Ahab had once, in a rage, pointed at Starbuck's own chest.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_03: And Starbuck stands there in the dark, holding the gun, with Ahab asleep just through the thin cabin wall.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_03: And he realizes I could end this right now.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_03: One shot.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_03: And every man on this ship goes home to his family, his wife, his child, back on Nantucket.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_03: He could see them again.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_03: All he has to do is pull the trigger on a sleeping madman who is going to kill them all anyway.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_03: And he can't.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_03: He agonizes.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_03: He argues with himself.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_03: He almost does it.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_03: And in the end, he cannot bring himself to murder his sleeping captain, even to save everyone.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_03: And he puts the gun back, and he goes up on deck, and the chance is gone forever.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's an almost perfect moral trap.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think there's a clean answer to it, which is why it's great.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_02: On one side, he could save thirty lives by taking one.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_02: The arithmetic screams at him.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_02: On the other side, to do it, he'd have to become a murderer of a sleeping, defenseless man.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_02: He'd have to break the deepest prohibition he lives by, on a prediction of what Ahab will do, not a certainty.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_02: And Starbuck is a man defined down to the root by his moral rules.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_02: For him to kill Ahab, he'd have to stop being Starbuck.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so his very goodness, his incorruptible refusal to murder, is what dooms everyone.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_02: His virtue and his fatal passivity are the same trait.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's the horror of it.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_03: The book keeps doing that.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_03: It keeps showing you that people's catastrophes grow out of their characters, not against them.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab is destroyed by his refusal to accept a meaningless wound, which is the same intensity that probably made him a great captain.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_03: Starbuck fails everyone through the same conscience that makes him the best man aboard.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody is undone by a flaw bolted on from outside.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_03: They're undone by who they most deeply are.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very mature, very unconsoling view of human beings.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_02: Our strengths and our undoings are often the same thing, seen from two sides.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_04: Part nine: The Three Day Chase and the End.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm bracing myself.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_02: How does it end?
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_03: For nearly the whole book, the white whale is absent.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_03: A rumor, a dread, a symbol.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_03: Along the way, the Pequad meets other whaling ships.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_03: These meetings are called gams, and each one is like a different possible attitude toward the whale.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_03: One ship, the Jeroboam, has had a disaster connected to Moby Dick and a crazed prophet aboard, warning them off.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_03: Another ship, the Enderby, has a captain who also lost a limb to Moby Dick, and who crucially has decided to simply leave the whale alone and get on with his life.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_03: Before, and one of them, carrying the captain's twelve year old son, is lost somewhere out on the sea.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_03: He implores Ahab to help him search, captain to captain, father to father, just for forty-eight hours.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_03: Help me find my boy.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_02: And Ahab says no.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab says no.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_03: He will not spare a single hour from his hunt to help another father find his drowning child.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_03: He turns the Rachel away and sails on.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's the moment Ahab forfeits the last of his humanity.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_03: The one time the book lets you fully condemn him, because here there's no cosmic grandeur, just a grieving father being refused.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it's devastating on a second level, because Ahab has a son at home and was weeping about him a few chapters earlier.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_02: He, of all people, should feel the Rachel Captain's agony.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_02: The fact that he can't anymore, that the obsession has burned out even that shows you how far gone he is.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_02: The wound has eaten his empathy.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's the final stage.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_02: When the fixed idea is total, other people stop being real to you.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_02: They become either tools for the quest or obstacles to it.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_02: The Rachel's captain is neither useful nor obstructive, so Ahab simply cannot see him as a person at all.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_03: And then they find the whale.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_03: The chase lasts three days.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_03: On the first day, Moby Dick destroys Ahab's whale boat, biting it clean in two, though Ahab survives.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_03: On the second day, the whale wrecks the boats again.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab's ivory leg is snapped off, and Fadalah, the prophet, is killed, dragged under, tangled in Ahab's own harpoon lines.
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_03: And Ahab, half crippled now even in his false leg, will not stop.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_03: Starbuck begs him, openly weeping now.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_03: Oh Ahab, not too late is it, even now to desist.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_03: See, Moby Dick seeks thee not.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_03: It is thou, thou that madly seekest him.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_03: He's telling Ahab the exact truth.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_03: The whale isn't hunting you, you're hunting you.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_03: Turn around.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_03: And Ahab cannot.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_02: It is thou that madly seekest him.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's the whole book in one line, isn't it?
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_02: The enemy was never pursuing you.
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_02: You manufactured the pursuit.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_02: The hunt was always a hunt for your own reflection.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_03: On the third day they lower again, and Ahab finally gets close enough to drive his harpoon into the white whale.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_03: And the whale, enraged, turns not on the little boats this time, but on the pequad itself, the mothership, and rams it head on.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_03: The great hull staves in.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_03: The ship begins to go down.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_03: And at that moment, Ahab in his own boat hurls his final harpoon with a last cry of defiance, something like, To the last I grapple with thee, from hell's heart I stab at thee.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_03: For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_03: And the rope of that harpoon flying out catches him around the neck, the hemp of the prophecy, and when the line runs out, it snatches him out of the boat and down into the sea, voiceless, gone, lashed to the whale, he hunted.
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_02: The sea just closes and continues as if none of it happened.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_02: The indifference Ahab couldn't bear has the last word.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_02: The universe doesn't even notice.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_03: And then the epilogue.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_03: One short page.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_03: Because someone has to have survived to tell us all this.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_03: Ishmael.
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_03: Ishmael.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_03: He was thrown from a boat and left on the margin of the vortex, and he's pulled toward the center as the ship sinks.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_03: And then, this is the chill I promised you, the one thing that bobs up out of the wreckage and keeps him afloat is a coffin.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_03: Earlier in the book, Quequeg had fallen gravely ill and had a coffin built for himself, and then recovered, and the coffin was sealed up and repurposed as a spare life buoy.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_03: And now, at the end, it floats free of the wreck, and Ishmael clings to it for a day and a night, and it is his friend Quiqueg's coffin that carries him alive across the sea until, and here's the other turn of the knife, he's picked up by the Rachel, the very ship that was still searching for her own lost children.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_03: It was the devious cruising Rachel that in her retracing search after her missing children only found another orphan.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_02: I have chills.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_02: Let me make sure I have all of it, because every piece is doing psychological work.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_02: Ishmael survives.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_02: The depressed watcher from page one, the man who went to sea instead of dying, lives, while everyone consumed by the quest dies.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_02: He's kept afloat by a coffin.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_02: The object of death becomes the instrument of life.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_02: And specifically by Kuique's coffin.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_02: The friendship that first pulled him back from despair at the start is, at the end, the literal thing that saves his body.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_02: And he's rescued by the Rachel, the grieving mothership, the one Ahab refused, which, still searching for her own lost child, finds instead this orphan.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_02: The whole book of destruction ends on an image of mercy, of being found.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_03: That's exactly right.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_03: And it's why the book, for all its darkness, doesn't leave you in despair.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_03: It spends 800 pages on obsession, revenge, and annihilation, and then quietly tells you that the one who lived was the one who could feel his pain without being commanded by it.
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_03: That what buoyed him was love and the death of a friend turned into life, and that he was saved by someone else's grief, generously turned outward into a search.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab turned his wound inward and hunted the sea.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_03: The Rachel turned her wound outward and searched the sea.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_03: One of those is death and one is mercy.
• 1:14:30
  SPEAKER_04: Part ten.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_04: So what is it really about?
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_04: A psychologist's summary.
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_02: Can I try to gather it all up the way I'd think about it after a long session?
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_02: And you correct me where the literature says I've oversimplified.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_03: Go.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_03: I'll only interrupt if you're wrong.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_02: At the center is Ahab.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_02: And Ahab is a study of what happens when a person cannot grieve.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_02: Something terrible and essentially meaningless happened to him.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_02: Nature took his leg, the way nature takes things, without intention.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_02: The healthy, human, unbearably hard task in front of him was to mourn, to accept the loss, to let it become part of his story, to live changed, but to live.
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_02: He couldn't do it.
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_02: Grief requires accepting that sometimes there is no one to blame and nothing to be done.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_02: And Ahab's whole soul rebelled against that.
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_02: So instead of grieving, he did something that felt stronger and was actually fatal.
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_02: He converted his grief into a mission.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_02: He gave the meaningless wound a face, the wail, and a purpose, revenge.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_02: And in doing so, he traded the pain of mourning for the false energy of a hunt.
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_03: And note that the trade works for a while.
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_03: The hunt gives him vitality, focus, a reason to live.
• 1:16:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's the trap.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_02: Revenge, grievance, obsession.
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_02: They're not experienced as suffering from the inside.
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_02: They're experienced as purpose.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_02: They organize the chaos.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_02: They feel like strength.
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_02: That's what makes them so much more seductive than grief, which just feels like helpless pain.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_02: Ahab chose the thing that felt like power over the thing that felt like weakness.
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_02: And the thing that felt like power was the thing that killed him and everyone around him.
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_02: And around Ahab, Melville arranges the other possible responses, like a spectrum.
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_02: Ishmael, hold the pain, watch it, stay curious, stay connected, survive.
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_02: Quiqueg simple, whole, loving, at peace with himself, and his love becomes the saving thing.
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_02: Starbuck, see the madness clearly, name it correctly, and still fail to stop it, because decency without the courage to break the rules is not enough.
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_02: Pip, be broken open by the void and fall into madness.
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_02: The Enderby Captain, suffer the identical wound and simply choose to let it go.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_02: And the Rachel, take your grief and turn it outward into care for others.
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_02: Ahab is the center, and every other character is a different answer to the same question.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_02: What do you do with a wound?
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_03: I'd add only one thing, which is the thing I think the book most wants a first reader to feel.
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_03: Melville does not let you feel superior to Ahab.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_03: He makes Ahab magnificent, eloquent, grand, even noble in his defiance.
• 1:18:18
  SPEAKER_03: When Ahab shakes his fist at the indifferent universe and refuses to accept a meaningless fate, there is something in us that thrills to it, that agrees.
• 1:18:30
  SPEAKER_03: Who hasn't wanted to strike through the mask to force the universe to answer for its cruelty?
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_03: The book's deepest move is to make you share Ahab's refusal, and then to show you slowly and completely exactly where that refusal leads.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_03: It honors the grandeur of the rebellion, and it shows you the shroud of the sea rolling on regardless, both at once.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not a book that says don't be obsessive the way a pamphlet would.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's a book that makes you feel in your own chest the pull of the thing that destroys Ahab and trusts you to notice what it costs.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_03: That's why it lasts.
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_03: A lesser book would make Ahab a fool so you could feel safe.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_03: Melville makes Ahab partly right and lets that be terrifying.
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_02: One last question, and it's the practical one.
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_02: The one a reader might actually carry home.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_02: If Ahab is the man who couldn't grieve, what does the book suggest grieving would have looked like?
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_02: Is it anywhere in the pages or only in its absence?
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's in Ishmael, I think.
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_03: Ishmael is the man who found a way to carry sorrow without being commanded by it.
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_03: And the secret of how he does it is threefold, and it's all there in the book.
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_03: First, he stays curious.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_03: The whole novel is stuffed with Ishmael's endless, loving, funny investigations into whales, into rope, into the color white, into everything.
• 1:20:24
  SPEAKER_03: A mind that stays curious about the world is a mind that hasn't collapsed into a single point.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab's world narrowed to one object.
• 1:20:35
  SPEAKER_03: Ishmael's stays wide.
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_03: Second, he stays connected.
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_03: The friendship with Quiqueg is not decoration, it's the whole difference.
• 1:20:45
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab is radically alone with his wound.
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_03: Ishmael is accompanied.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_03: And third, he stays a witness.
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_03: He tells the story.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_03: He turns what happened to him into a narrative he can hold and hand to someone else.
• 1:21:01
  SPEAKER_03: Ahab tried to act out his pain, to discharge it onto the world.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_03: Ishmael tells his, and telling it, making meaning you can share rather than vengeance you inflict, is in the end what lets him live.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_02: Curious, connected, and a witness against narrow alone and acting it out.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's not a bad map of two ways to carry a wound through a life.
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_03: It's the map the book draws in the shape of a whale.
• 1:21:39
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to read it now.
• 1:21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Finally.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_02: Where should I start?
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_02: Do I need to brace for the whale anatomy chapters people complain about?
• 1:21:50
  SPEAKER_03: Let them wash over you.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_03: Those chapters are Ishmael's curious mind at work.
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_03: They're the cure in action, right there on the page.
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_03: A man keeping himself alive by paying passionate attention to the world.
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_03: Once you see them that way, they stop being an obstacle and start being the point.
• 1:22:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that is Moby Dick.
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_00: The thin line between purpose and obsession, and what it costs to chase a thing that was never really about the thing at all.
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you ever pick up the book, you now know where it is going.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And if you never do, you have the story anyway.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_00: That is where we will leave it for today.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_00: A long book has never made you feel you were the problem.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope this showed you another way in.
• 1:22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you to Clara and Theo, and thank you for listening.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want a way of working the feats of brain to work too, not only with books, just contact me.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be happy to hear you.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_00: I am Daniele Forni, and this has been the Later Shaman Podcast.
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_00: And until the next story, take care of your inner world.