How To Read Moby Dick:Johnny Pulp and the Lemonheads
Sleeve Notes
Open the novel and pretend the lamps are the first creatures. Each wick lifts like a rib from Genesis and learns to breathe in. Light separates from light, and what looks like a boarding house becomes a small creation, too domestic for thunder, yet stubborn enough to outlive it. From here the lover is easy. You collect witnesses the way a beach collects weed swell. Job will mutter about scales, Jonah will remeasure direction with his guilt, Psalms will take the swell for a metronome, Isaiah will scold your metaphors until they repent. Then, when the reader is properly staffed with scripture and sloop brain, let Montaigne bring a wicker chair and Rabelais a plate, and notice how everything suddenly consents to be serious while tasting of cider. The learned will ask for authorities and the sea will provide them. Holland’s Plutarch sets the table with moral fibre, practical stools for those who perform courage by habit. Holland’s Pliny provides a cabinet of wonders where the squid already understands rhetoric and the moon plays tide like a stringed instrument. Took’s Lucian smuggles satire aboard, and once aboard it behaves all goony. Meanwhile, Other’s verbal narrative, that dockside Herodotus, reminds you to trust rumour when it keeps the hour. One needs such company because Melville is greedy for fat witnesses. He will accept a scrap of loglover from Spitzbergen as readily as a scholium on Isaiah. He will pin a whale tooth beside a Platonic sentence and demand that both shine with equal clarity. They do, at least for a page. I break down in the night, tears like seeds that scatter themselves and continue to grow when out of sight. What the careful reader neglects is the way women keep placing the lamps. The lover is supposedly a masculine brain, all rope and quarrel and the long bachelor night of voyages. Yet everywhere that counts a woman is quietly arranging the air. She stands in kitchens where oil loses its smoke, in counting rooms where sums remember mercy, in island schools where vowels catch the wind, in pews where a psalm is pronounced so that the sea must listen. She keeps names, binds letters, sells bone without apology, trims the wick when men enlarge their mouths. Observe her as if she were a biblical creature, not Eve to be accused nor Ruth to be praised on cue, but a sovereignty that looks like care. Call her eros if you must. Call her the white whale if you dare. At least admit that heat with no owner crosses from her work into the story and steadies it when the brain forgets itself. Stowe’s Annals gives you a grammar for towns that do not need to pose. Lord Bacon’s Psalms, made of Latin thunder and Tudor brass, teaches you to accept a certain audacity in prayer. Ibid, poor Ibid, the ghost citation that haunts pedants, follows you like a gull and steals bread. King Henry and Hamlet bring presiding tones. One speaks policy as if rows of barrels were arguments, the other learns that thinking is a kind of sea trial. The Faerie Queene stains your eye with allegory until even a rusted boat hook becomes a symbol for moderation. Davenant offers stage carpentry for moonlight and yards. Browne arrives with Of Sperma Ceti and turns head matter into liturgy. He is the physician of clear substance, the saint of refined utility. Read him in a room warmed by oil and you will feel your hands become more articulate. The women remain, partly in view, partly not. They are not sirens and not merely widows. They are arbiters of the inland climate. They run shops that smell of tar and arithmetic. They read a ledger that closes true because lovers need shoes. They conspire with the alphabet, teach a primer to breathe, decide which rumours earn space on a press. They are also erotic, quietly decisive. Not the novelist’s embroidered disaster, not the sentimental governess, but bodies that cause decisions to ripen. A kiss in a lane that teaches a sailor his courage. A hand on a sill that tells a judge what fairness costs this week. A skirt that brushes the ropewalk and the rope learns its manners. If you have ever wondered why the lamps in the lover so often steady by a finger’s breadth without a named cause, it is because these women enter the paragraph by a side door and repair it. Walter’s tale of the Sumer Islands keeps powder dry and memory smoky, while Hobbes’s Leviathan places sovereignty on the deck and calls it necessary. Holy War and Paradise Lost wire the quarterdeck for apocalypse and angelic logistics. Fuller’s Profane and Holy State offers portraits honest enough to live beside a rope maker’s hands. Dryden teaches the city how to count its fires. Edge’s Spitzbergen, Herbert’s Asia and Africa, Schouten’s circumnavigation, and every Greenland that must be approached as if it were a sentence, they all furnish ways to stand at a rail and distinguish chance from current. Sibbald’s Fife and Kinross pushes the land forward to meet the sea and proves that coasts are already negotiations. The Bermudas letter stiffens your back against humidity and misrule, while the New England Primer raises the stern alphabet that will be needed when whales begin to make their case. Captain Cowley, Ulloa, and Cook bring maps that never quite stand still. Uno von Troil hands you aurora in a pocket diary. Jefferson writes his whale memorial as if light were a constitutional promise, and he is right. Burke corrects your awe with proportion, Blackstone trims your enthusiasm for righteous storms with the simply stated claim that roofs are law, which is to say, mercy. Falconer keeps the deck from drowning in adjectives. Cowper returns you to the room where patience survives fashion. John Hunter shows anatomy as an ethics for hands. Paley insists that hinges are sermons if properly heard. Cuvier gives fossils a tone so firm you suspect they are still living. Colnett teaches how a season learns to be lawful. Montgomery supplies antediluvian imagination, a courier between flood and conjecture. Lamb puts a crown on the beast and slyly questions the court that offers it. Macy writes a single island until it becomes a world. Hawthorne makes piety translucent. Cooper teaches the wheel to whisper. Eckermann sits with Goethe and discovers that conversation can be a climate. Owen Chase enters with hunger that does not complain and therefore becomes scripture. Elizabeth Oakes Smith watches Scoresby judge ice with a pencil. Beale replaces superstition with method and refuses to blink. Bennett makes a republic of tools. Browne draws men in ink that remembers laughter. Lay and Hussey, and Tyerman and Bennet, set presses humming in lagoons where the alphabet becomes a civic water. Daniel Webster speaks as if the tide respected cadence. Cheever exhorts with a voice that smells of rope and moral vinegar. Comstock counts casks in a shop that learned justice by weight. McCulloch corrals commerce into definitions that feel like doors. Currents and Whaling teaches that arrows on maps are promises kept by water. The Arctic voyager confesses patience to the floe. The Hobomock account demonstrates that a ship can be taken and retaken without losing its posture. Cruise on a whale boat gives the close work every myth requires. Miriam Coffin arranges a town to the meter of rain. Ribs and Trucks instructs you in how curves survive pressure. Darwin introduces time that edits with kindness. Wharton insists on price and silence. Nantucket sings only what it can keep. Whale Song reveals pressure as music. Now return to the novel and notice what is. The whalemen are not ascetics. Their bodies burn. They remember the particular softness of a neck, the ecstatic whimper of a breast’s dark nipple after a winter bath, the courage living there in such atrocious agonies. In their pockets are notes that would embarrass a preacher. On their tongues are women who stand like piers in their lives. These women arrive at the Spouter Inn without names, steady the landlord’s wife by a nod, unnerve Ishmael because tenderness is better discipline than fear. They are in the sermon, too, in the breath of widows who find their dead useful, placing them in prayers with the precision of a cooper. They are in the squeeze of the hand, because erotic labour moves through pulp and laughter until disgust dissolves and a common warmth remains. Why treat eros as a whiteness rather than a firework? Because the lover does not announce, it insinuates. Because the famous whiteness does double duty. It terrifies when it erases boundaries at sea, then returns to town as clarity, as legible rooms, as time for the body. That is eros, not merely appetite but a light by which care can see. When the chase ends with loss and a whirl that refuses funerals, eros still circulates in the lamps the whale paid for, in the children who continue their alphabet, in the women who set bread and do not apologize for grace that is practical. Consider the quarterdeck. Ahab swears by the ounce of gold and the scratched coin shines like a sacrament. Under that scene Webster rearranges sentences into law, Hobbes tests them for sovereignty, Fuller sketches the moral faces on either side of zeal, while a woman nobody names trims a lamp at home and asks nobody permission to do so. Such is the counterweight. The ship storms outward, the inland room keeps a small republic intact. Melville lets both stand because he wants to remain indecent. The anatomical chapters, which many flee, are the erotic centre, though the lover is too tactful to say so. Hunter opens the head with a reputation for calm. Paley watches the hinge. Browne calls the clear fullness a sacrament. Beale verifies method. The oil that results is not only fuel for trade. It is civil heat, intimate light, and the novel knows it. When men squeeze, friendship becomes a body and bodies discover they were never enemies. That the scene is comic does not make it less sacred. It makes it safer to print. One could be pedantic and ask for chapter and verse. Better to ask for women’s hands. They appear when menus arrive, when debts are forgiven, when young men act like fools and are tolerated because next week they must sail. Old men too. They appear when Lay and Hussey build a press out of patience and bark cloth, when Tyerman drafts a notice in short lines so the wind can carry it to poor readers, when Miriam balances accounts so that a widow may buy weight at cost rather than at shame. They are present when a missionary refuses to scold and chooses to listen, when a shopkeeper places the jawbone carving in the window so a girl can learn hardness. Speak of eros now and do not blush. It is the movement of warmth across a face that has been cold too long. It is the breath from the blowhole touching the cheek of anyone who keeps a lamp by their window. Whiteness behaves like a logic. It is not purity, which withers into boredom, nor annihilation, which is only panic improved. It is a pervasive medium, a field condition under which rooms become legible, ribs remain unbroken, and vows can keep. In the chase it is judgment, unmoved by our lovely words. In town it is civility with a mild temperature. Here is the pleasing paradox. The monster that erases is also the mother of clarity. The lover never settles the account because it is more ethical to leave the problem live. Genesis knew this when it placed light in sequence and kept waters stubborn. Job knew this when the behemoth refused audition. Jonah knew this when his direction corrected itself. Psalms knew it every time it found breath at night. Isaiah knew it when he scolded ornament . Let the humour remain. The novel cannot live in a single tone. Rabelais makes bawdy safe for work. Montaigne gives permission to be wrong for a while without perishing. Browne shows how ornament can be a courtesy when substance would be raw. Hawthorne lends a shade where conscience can cool. The jokes on deck are valves in the lover’s heart. When Stubb talks, wrath lowers its shoulders. When a sailor sings, the sea, which famously does not care, pauses for a moment to listen because rhythm is the only human language it halfway respects. Science is not devout, yet it kneels correctly. Darwin goes ashore to watch barnacles argue and comes back to sea with a kinder vocabulary for change. Scoresby builds a theology of ice in the margin of a map. Bennett writes tools into a constitution. Colnett formalizes patience into routes. Beale removes a false mystery and leaves a truer one standing. These are erotic acts as surely as kisses, because attention is the body’s ongoing pledge to the world. In that sense every bench is a bed, every dissection a fidelity, every entry in a ledger a love letter to an exact thing. By now the bibliography lives in your wrist. The scriptures have turned the lamps into instruments, the jurists have kept roofs above your head, the travelers have widened your appetite for particulars, the anatomists have trained your tenderness to avoid lies, the merchants have taught your admiration for storms to serve a loaf, the poets have kept your hunger within meter, the islanders have printed a small republic one sheet at a time. Even the pedants, bless them, have been placated by names and dates long enough to let the page breathe. A last suggestion for how to reread. Change the music under each chapter. If the Spouter Inn stood beside Genesis and Rabelais last time, let it stand beside Blackstone and Hawthorne next time. If the quarterdeck was framed by Milton and Webster, try Fuller and Stowe. Read the try works with Hunter and Browne, then with Currents and McCulloch, then with a woman you love trimming a wick in your peripheral memory. The chapters do not move. Your lamp learns to. There is a corridor in the lover. No architecture marks it. It runs from the first inn to the last wave and continues into a thousand kitchens and shops. Along it moves a warmth with no owner. It crosses faces in boats, persuades lanthorns to be brave, enters towns and steadies flames by a finger’s width, visits schools where a girl reads a perfect line and a boy does not cough, stands in a counting room where a small debt is forgiven, turns in a bedroom where a woman lets the sheet cool and then warms it again with her knee, touches the hands of men at sea who pretend not to notice they have been comforted. Call it eros if you like. Call it whiteness if you must. Call it the whale. The name does not improve the fact. Now shut the anthology in your head and open the novel. Do not be in a hurry. Let a lamp come to full height on the page. Listen for Job’s refusal and Jonah’s correction, for Psalms in the line and Isaiah in the smoke. Let Plutarch weigh Stubb, let Pliny nod at a curious tide, let Lucian grin in the ropes, let Montaigne shrug us into prudence, let Rabelais feed us, let Browne bless the clear substance, let Hobbes remind us to be civil even about madness, let Milton place horizon where it belongs at the front of your mind, let Fuller point out which portrait resembles you today. Keep the travel writers beside you so that every latitude will seem like a sentence. Keep Paley and Hunter for the bench work, Beale and Bennett for tools, Browne for ink, Lay and Hussey for letters, Tyerman for notices that do not scold, Webster for cadence that teaches breath to stand up straight, Cheever for the stern reminder that cups should be set down at the right hour, Comstock for a shop where totals refuse theatrics, McCulloch for a term that learns to be honest, Currents for the arrows no storm erases, Arctic patience for the inches gained, Hobomock for rooms retaken without noise, the whale boat for the close work, Miriam for the town, ribs and trucks for the curve that does not break, Darwin for time, Wharton for price, Nantucket for chorus, and the last song for the pressure that means tenderness. Read one page. If your face warms, let it. If your hands remember someone else’s hands, let them. The novel is not a puzzle and not a sermon. It is an arrangement of hours in which civility survives brain. The women will keep returning with the lamps. The men will keep departing with their long, coarse courage. The whale will keep writing its law on the surface and refusing to comment. You will keep learning how to breathe in rooms you did not know were yours. And that is how to read it, and how to write it again by reading it the way light reads a room. So this is the lover, again. Call me if you like, and a name is only an oar laid across water. Imagine that. The story begins where light learns civility in spit and sperm. A room in New Bedford, a table with a lamp that stands up as if remembering a first day in Genesis. The wick is a rib. It divides the dark without anger but nevertheless can’t help but prick. Outside, winter presses its face to the panes and finds its reflection corrected, screaming, devastated by its interior witness. Inside, the air acquires a slower grammar. I arrived there to get well, or to let the sea finish an argument it had started with me when I was a child standing at a rail. The city breathed a mixture of brine and arithmetic. Women carried baskets with an exact strength, as if their hands had signed a compact with the hour. Men walked with the inward tilt of a creature that remembers masts even when facing bread. The harbour kept its law, tide upon tide, and the lamps along the street offered a mild theology that needed no sermon. The Spouter Inn held a painting that was a brain forecast written by God without apology. A chaos of gray muscles, a white eruption, a boat the size of a mouth. I sat to stew in awe and was interrupted by a body that moved like a sentence with no wasted words. She crossed the room with a tray and set down cups without making a sound. Her dress smelled faintly of oil and starch. The room had been arranged by women, though the talk thought otherwise. I ate with an obedience I had not practiced in years. The landlord’s voice was wind across a field of bottles. The night grew practical. A stranger of sable skin and careful tattoos came to share the bed, and the scene that should have produced a riot in a smaller soul produced only the strange peace of adoption. We spoke little. We slept with the ease of tools that had found their hook. The lamp stood in its clear circle and did not blink. Sunday brought Jonah’s parable in timber and salt. The chapel gathered grief as a harvest. Widows sat with accounts that had learned patience. A preacher raised the lover and read with the clipped generosity of someone who had buried too many boys to lie to any mother. Jonah was not about disobedience to a God who loved a straight line. Jonah was about a direction that tries to escape its own meaning and is returned without malice but probably mad. While he spoke, I watched the lamps along the walls. The wicks were trimmed by a woman whose hair had learned the salt air. She moved with the authority of someone who had once held smoke. She steadied the congregation rolling between her legs and listened better. Afterward I signed on the Pequod because the ship looked like work and because the lamps kept their posture when I passed her by. The yard smelled of tar and oakum and coffee that had been boiled until it learned compliance. At the counter a man named Comstock counted casks and trued coins. He had the mercy of a precise hand. Behind him a carving of a jawbone ship sat in a window and retaught hardness how to be useful. A woman came in to buy a line for a boy who would go as boatsteerer. She tested the rope with a calm that made the clerk forget profit for a breath. There was an understanding between them that did not require courtship. The ledger closed true. If the world were only brain and men, I would have turned monk and finished quickly. The world contains other sovereignties. They keep houses. They run presses under breadfruit trees. They rule shops with a glance that measures a pound without putting it on the scale. They place lamps in the right place at dusk. Their bodies have heat that crosses to a man’s face without permission and corrects his thought. When I say eros I do not mean a pantomime of appetite. I mean the mild flame that enters rooms and asks them to be better. Call it whiteness if the word helps, though that word has already been burdened with too many sermons. Call it the whale if you enjoy risking your sleep. We sailed at a polite dawn. The water finished its handshake with the keel and we entered the civic empire of currents. The Gulf Stream traveled like a patient senator, the Labrador returned with a cold memory that taught moderation. Along the seam of two waters something moved without haste, as if a large vow were practicing. The deck learned a politics of order. Ahab was not on deck. He arrived like a verdict that refused to slam its gavel. He stood and the spars remembered how to hold still. He spoke once, and gold lit the air, not as glory, more like a coin that remembered the warmth of a pocket. He swore us to a pursuit that sounded like justice if you listened from the right angle. From the wrong angle it was a prayer without humility. Webster could have argued the case for a day, and Hobbes would have asked for a chair with arms. At noon the crew settled to their stations and made of the ship a city that walked. Stubb joked with a voice that saved lives, Flask proved that small men measure well, Starbuck kept his soul like a polished tool, and Queequeg ran palm over rope until the rope confessed friendship. The women were present in the work by their absence in the talk. Their cooking kept our blood. Their letters turned the mess table into a courtroom where appetite apologized. Their long approvals and refusals waited inside every packet a man pressed into his shirt. I saw a sailor stand longer at the rail because he remembered a wrist that had steadied a cup while a storm attempted philosophy. Plutarch watched from the topgallant yard with tasteful approval. Pliny nodded at a moon that lifted tidelines like scripture. Lucian grinned in a coil of line and did no harm. Montaigne sat on a bitt and defined the essay as a harpoon practice. Rabelais taught the cook how to season a pot with laughter. Stowe would have written the minutes kindly had she been on board. Browne blessed the clear substance he would one day see in pots that roar like sanctified thunder. Dryden counted the sparks like an honest historian of fire. Edge and Scoresby made ice into a school. Sibbald walked with a map folded under his ribs. Stafford’s letter reached us in a dusk where the air tasted of lime and law. The first lowering was a grammar lesson. The animal rose as if the ocean had remembered a syllable it needed to complete a thought. The breath climbed. Warm. A column that corrected the air. The oars took the old meter. Irons spoke their simple yes. The line sang. The tub smoked. Our ribs learned to read speed. The lance went in where patience told it to. Silence came down as if folding a blanket with the care of a mother who finally had a minute to herself. The oil lifted like a second water. We named tools because names of men were not steady yet. Back aboard, the tryworks began their red sermon and the ship accepted the sermon like a parish that has learned to love its priest by knowing his faults. The head matters required a bench and a mind that could refuse panic. John Hunter would have approved our calm. Paley would have blessed our hinges. Cuvier would have sketched extinction on the air with a finger and asked nothing cruel. Browne would have pronounced a liturgy without Latin. Beale would have taken notes with plain joy. While we worked I remembered rooms where women trimmed wicks to draw the smoke away from a child’s throat. Those rooms were not in the lover according to men who think the sea is only for men. The lover included those rooms and had always done so. When we strained the clear substance, I thought of a girl in a school reading the New England alphabet under a wind that liked to tease paper. I thought of a woman adding columns with a pencil chewed down to honesty. I thought of a name on a letter pressed to a chest. Erotic, yes, because it made blood choose mercy. We made ports where rumour had learned to eat fruit. Lay and Hussey arranged a press that printed decency in short lines. Tyerman posted a notice about nets that remembered justice. The wind read the notice aloud for those who could not. Women taught vowels to cooperate. Children learned to pronounce yes without fear. In a chapel that smelled of bark cloth and cocoanut oil, a psalm found the right meter for a reef that did not often forgive. Outside the pass a pale breadth turned and the lagoon paused, as if the island had been visited by a thought it would keep for years without telling. On other coasts trade made its case. McCulloch would have approved the accuracy of our terms. Comstock would have refused to cheat a widowed buyer and slept better. Cheever scolded us about cups and knives and was correct. Daniel Webster spoke to a pier piled with timber as if it were a jury. He asked the law to be fair where it meets the sea. He kept his coat on in the wind. I stood and listened and thought that cadence is a gift the tide respects. Storms rehearsed and performed. The ship bowed the way a proud man bows when an old aunt insists. Milton placed a horizon around us and removed ornament with a clean blade. Burke shamefaced my awe until I learned proportion. Cooper met the wheel and whispered until it answered correctly. Fuller pointed out which face in the crew resembled me too closely and asked for the small amendment that saves a life. At night, under the click in the skull that announces pressure, Whale Song wrapped the hull with a belt of sound that was also touch. The lanterns remembered their job and widened their circles by a little without show. Between voyages I fell in love twice. Not with pageants. With women who had the courage of ledgers and a mouth that refused to scold when silence would do better. One ran a shop where the floor kept time with the sea. She raised her head when I entered and I felt the day take a breath. We walked together to the end of a ropewalk. She spoke of price, then of a cousin whose child had learned letters by a candle she had paid for with bone. She touched my wrist with one cool finger and asked that my ship be punctual at dawn. I loved her because she honoured time. Another kept a school where boys were taught to break bread with their grief and girls were taught to look at men as if men were not the centre of anything. She let me hold an ink stained primer and told me that fish listen to short lines better than long ones. I loved her because she believed in air. The white whale kept its jurisdiction. It rose at a distance at noon. It wrote a curved law on water in the presence of men who had learned not to bow to any man. Ahab set himself to repeal that law. He did it with all the proud intelligence at his command. He quoted scripture and tragedy and commerce and could have won any court except the one that matters. His mind had been trained by lovers and storms, and if he had turned its jurisprudence to the keeping of rooms he would have been a saint. Instead he placed his whole faculty in the service of a wound that never closed. Starbuck argued from prudence and was no match for fever. Stubb joked from kindness and was no match for zeal. Queequeg prepared his raft with the competence of an exemplar in Plutarch and nearly became my salvation by that. In a calm that smelled of limes, the crew squeezed hands inside amber. Erotic labour blessed every knuckle. The men laughed and the ship remembered that laughter is a harness. The oil grew clear as a thought that has finally chosen the right sentence. In that hour I believed the lover might become only an inventory of mercies. It was not to be. The captain hammered his will across water. The horizon turned to iron. The animal accepted the provocation with none of the heat we brought to it. It spoke with the voice of a system. It erased. We followed. The chase declared its form. It could not be reformed. Before the end, nights brought dreams that were simply honest. Women walked them without shame. One came into my cabin without sound and stood by the lamp, watching it as if she had been appointed. She did not look at me. She reached out and steadied the flame by a finger’s width. She left. I woke and the lamp held its shape. I took this as a gift and said nothing in the morning. Another dream gave me a girl in a school on an island. She held a slate and wrote the letter that begins mercy without knowing what she had done. Outside the pass, a pallid ridge traveled. The lagoon changed its mind by a degree and accepted a lesson no man had taught. We saw the animal fully on a day so simple the deck blushed. It rose and went forward. It turned and came back. It fulfilled a geometry. It had all the majesty of a court that has never known scandal. It had all the kindness of a fact. We cast and were drawn. We cut and were cut. Miltons unrolled in the mouth. Jobs muttered in the blood. No sermon could be preached to that situation that did not make the congregation laugh without humour. The sea took what lay loose and returned what had learned to hold. The ship wrote a paragraph with its last air. The last word belonged to a silence that did not hate us. I cannot improve upon the whirl. It folded us with the courtesy of a napkin on a table cleared for the next meal. When I rose among casks and night I discovered that the world had continued. A plank remembered me. A current knew the route. I was carried out of the jurisdiction of spectacle and deposited in the province of small work. A woman found me later with a bowl of soup. She held it not as a nurse but as a magistrate who understands that hunger must be negotiated. I ate and regained my correct mass. There is an afterward that refuses to be printed. Lamps in towns we never saw stood stiller. A widow counted and found her breath lengthen. A child read without coughing. On an atoll a notice was printed with lines so short that the wind obeyed. In a shop a clerk forgave a small debt because the figures behaved and he could afford kindness. On a ropewalk a woman walked past and the rope forgot to snarl. The whales sank and rose and wrote their sentences on water without filing for copyright. I kept company with Darwin for a season and learned that change can be coaxed out of a barnacle by sheer fidelity. I read Paley and forgave his watch because he loved its hinge. I looked at bones with Cuvier’s appetite and tried not to become cruel. I sat with Bennett and learned to respect tools as citizens. I stood by Comstock and watched him close a ledger like a prayer. I listened to Webster and became a little more polite. I schemed with Miriam Coffin and understood that commerce is the art of keeping grief from spoiling the bread. I walked the island with Macy’s plain lover and learned that a town that seats its lamps correctly can outlast a dozen tempests of fame. I laughed with Browne’s ink at the foibles of men who would otherwise have stabbed each other for want of laughter. Sometimes I returned in thought to Queequeg and his calm. He had carved his coffin into a grammar that would carry a man through water. He understood pressure and accepted instruction from it. I considered Ahab and wished he had sat one evening with a woman who knew how to tell a story that ends at the proper time. I considered Starbuck and wished he had a friend who would take his sorrow out for a walk that lasted until grief grew bored. I considered Stubb and thanked him for keeping the ship human. I considered the lamps and acknowledged that their steadiness had always been the protagonist. There are those who read the lover and fail to detect any heat except the friction between pride and fate. They are to be forgiven. They were raised by an education that smuggled shame into appetite. Let them sit for a time in a kitchen where a woman measures flour with a hand that never lies. Let them help print a notice in a school where a girl sets vowels on a clean line and enjoys them without fear. Let them carry a cask through a shop where a man has decided not to pocket the ounce he could have taken. Let them watch a lamp take air on its small schedule and hold fast. They will begin to suspect that eros is not spectacle. It is a warm clarity that enters every room the whale passes and leaves behind an ability to see. If I were to write a final instruction, I would write it on the inside of a door rather than on any page. It would say, place the lamp first. Read by that light. Learn to count with mercy. Believe rumour only when it is generous. Let scripture teach breath. Let travel teach patience. Let science teach tenderness. Let trade teach proportion. Let women arrange the air. Pursue nothing that insults the room where a child learns her alphabet. When the white breadth rises at the bar, nod. When it goes, get on with the evening. When grief comes, allow it exact time and exact bread. When laughter insists, seat it near the knives. When work demands, give it your hands and keep your manner. The sea will offer law. Accept it when it helps the roof and argue with it when it flatters pride. The lover will remain what it was, a corridor in which warmth without owner passes through faces and glass and refuses to be thanked. The whale will continue to write a curved line under the stars. The lamps will continue to read that line and decide to stand still. If you must rename the animal to sleep, call her love. If you must keep the old name to be brave, call her what the crew called her and then keep your voice low. Either way, the rooms will hold and the day will be legible.