It gets a bad rep for being hard to read (which it is because of the sea-faring and archaic vocabulary) but it’s surprisingly entertaining with even a casual/jovial tone at times. I haven’t finished it, but so far like 30% of the book is irrelevant to the plot and is just the authors random musings and philosophies on life. He dedicates entire pages to debating what the most comfortable room temperature and position to sleep in is, or his opinions on random countries like Japan or “Affghanistan”. It almost reads like blogposts or diary entries.
He also has surprisingly modern humor and opinions. He makes borderline gay jokes when he has to sleep in bed with an African man “Queequog”, and then describes how he respects him, saying “the man’s a human being just as I am; he has just as much reason to fear me…better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” and that “It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin”. The two develop this wholesome Rush Hour style partnership that’s pretty funny.
There’s also one part where he states that even though he’s Christian, he respects anyone’s beliefs as long as they hurt noone.
I also really liked how it occasionally shifts to the 1st person perspective of Captain Ahab or Starbuck for a chapter which adds good variety.
It is a historical forgery attributed to a man who did not exist. So are some of Shakespeare’s plays, Emily Bronte, a good deal of the Romantics including Willian Blake and Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickens, Twain, Thomas Mann, Poe, Dostoevsky, at least one Oscar Wilde novel (he DID write poetry), Zola, Gogol, Lewis Carroll, Conrad, Joyce, Kafka, Marx and Tolstoy and more 20th century writers, poets, philosophers and painters, sculptors and other artists (never mind musicians) than you could imagine. This is why it sounds “modern”. It turns out no one could write or write anything that wasn’t lurid, vulgar or stupid, and so we have a history of artistic frauds to bring up the general tenor of public discussion and culture. This was also done for the works of people far off in the past — look up ‘pseudo-Aristotle’. There is a pseudo-Galen and pseudo-a lot of other great minds.
‘Moby Dick’ was actually written in the first decade of this century by an English and history grad student at Bard College. It was sent back in time to a certain point and introduced suddenly to the public by a small, knowing (you can guess who they’re associated with) group of people (the book actually showed up in perhaps in the ‘20s or ‘30s and was treated as a lost work of literature and presented with grand public announcements and PR spectacles). This seems like some kind of joke, but it isn’t. People are putridly stupid, but thanks to this program, society isn’t as dumb as they were going to be. And it’s STILL stupid (see, for the most extreme examples: incels and white supremacist groups, everyone on TikTok for a less glaring example).
“sent back in time”??
Yes. Read about Richard Feynman’s (really, Caltech & SFSU & University of Alaska) quantum communications project; it is legally a protected medium for communicating or sending information, a la radio, television or the internet. You may be seeing something now! Ta-da!
I strongly urge you to resume taking your meds.
We created modernity. We don’t all know each other — I’ve only met some through working with them. Some of this work was done at schools and observatories. As a sidenote, as a musician at heart, human beings are the only animals that can appreciate and play music. But very few can write songs or musical works, it turns out. Even if they can credibly play a few chords or an instrument, they rarely can string together a whole song, much less in concert with other musicians (there is usually a band leader and director, also, who is typically the composer or writer, meaning there was only one person writing the song itself, but with the aid of trained musicians to play it). Writing or creating music (and I assume any form of art or philosophy or science or cogent political ideas) is quite difficult and out of most people’s reach.