All these things are not without their meanings

"In token of my admiration for his genius this book is inscribed the Nathaniel Hawthorne." Am I the only one who found Melville's dedication of Moby Dick to Hawthorne terribly moving? The two men were close friends, and Hawthorne, a successful author at the time, was one of Melville's few literary champions. I learned here that, after Hawthorne read the final draft of Moby Dick, he pronounced it work of genius, and Melville responded: “A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”

A wicked book? Isn't it supposed to be about good vs. evil, etc.? Well, let's look at the sermon, because I suppose I know a thing or two about sermons. As noted on the website I linked to above, in the Bible, the whale is God's instrument to whip Jonah into shape. But in Moby Dick, God is the sea, and the sea uses the whale to bring down Ahab. Jonah is a coward, while Ahab certainly is not, but Jonah worships the false god of his own importance, while Ahab worships of the god of his own ambition.

Another thing worth noting in the sermon: Jonah pays to go aboard the ship to Tarshish, but Ishmael, as he has made clear, would never pay to go to sea. "And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid," he says in Loomings. "The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves [Adam & Eve, of course--SL] entailed upon us. But being paid,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills [actually, the Bible says that the LOVE of money is root of all evil, a point that all good Christian capitalists like to point out.--SL), and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!"

I thought I'd try to post a memorable picture from Moby Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page in my missives. Given my subject for this post, I thought this one appropriate:

"Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God..."