Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick Page A

“How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night,” he says.
    There is a lesson in all of this. “Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me,” Ishmael advises. “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” What is needed more than anything else in the midst of a crisis is a calm, steadying dose of clarity, the kind of omniscient, all-seeing perspective symbolized by an eagle on the wing: “And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.” Here Melville provides a description of the ideal leader, the anti-Ahab who instead of anger and pain relies on equanimity and judgment, who does his best to remain above the fray, and who even in the darkest of possible moments resists the “woe that is madness.”
    As I have said before, Moby-Dick is a book that was written for the future. In this portrait of a person who resists the fiery, disorienting passions of the moment, who has the soul of a high-flying Catskill eagle, Melville, in his preternatural way, has hit upon a description of the political figure America desperately needed in 1851 but who would not appear on the national stage until almost a decade later, when Abraham Lincoln became president of the United States.

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    So Remorseless a Havoc
    I n chapter 105, Melville tackles a prescient question given today’s extinction-prone Earth: “whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must . . . , like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.” In the paragraphs that follow, Ishmael compares the whale to the buffalo in the American West and acknowledges that given what has happened to those “humped herds,” it might seem inevitable that “the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.”
    But after examining the question from a variety of angles, he decides that this is not the case. First off, whales have a much larger habitat than the buffalo—larger, in fact, than all the earth’s landmasses combined. Second, sperm whales have the ability to retreat to “their Polar citadels” in the icy north and south, where they can “bid defiance to all pursuit from man.” As a consequence, the whale is, Ishmael insists, “immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality.”
    For those of us who grew up in the aftermath of the industrialized slaughter of whales in the 1950s and 1960s, when it looked as if several species of cetaceans would indeed go the way of the buffalo, Ishmael might seem woefully naive, especially since the world’s ice sheet has so dramatically diminished in recent years. On the other hand, the sperm whale population is now on the rebound even as evidence continues to mount that our addiction to what replaced whale oil—petroleum—has contributed to global warming and sea-level rise. In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity. Maybe Ishmael’s reference to “the last man” is more than a figure of speech. Instead of whales, maybe the endangered megafauna is us.
    â€œIn Noah’s flood [the whale] despised Noah’s Ark,” Ishmael reminds us, “and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.” There it