Status Updates From Why Read Moby-Dick?

Revisiting this little gem cause I just finished a reread of Moby Dick and I’m in Melville withdrawal. I don’t have any real friends to nerd out about it with (not because I don’t have friends; I just don’t have friends who will read Moby Dick with me) so I have to settle for Nathaniel Philbrick lol.

“The job of government…is to keep the shark at bay. All of us are, to a certain degree, capable of wrongdoing. Without some form of government, evil will prevail. Here lies the source of the Founding Fathers’…unforgivable omission. They refused to contain the great, ravening shark of slavery, and more than two generations later their grandchildren and great-grandchildren were about to suffer the consequences.”

“Time passes, fashions come and go, and the past becomes its own, hermetically sealed world. It’s easy to laugh at those people under figurative glass, or, even worse, to revere them as exempt from the complexities of our own age. Baloney. Life is life, and the world Melville describes in Moby Dick is as cutting-edge, confused, and out there as anything we can dream up in our own time.”