While the experience of whalers in the mid-1800s isn't something I had previously spent a lot of time thinking about, I actually came out of the New Bedford whaling museum and the discussions of Moby Dick with a lot of questions:
1. Is someone who creates one work of transcendent brilliance in a life otherwise characterized by struggles, pressures, failures, depression, half-completed whaling expeditions, etc. more fulfilled when it's all over than an "ordinary" man who climbs his modest professional ladder, supports a family, goes on vacation, builds a deck, etc, and passes anonymously into history? To have the best of both lives is of course ideal, but to hear about the process of creation of Moby Dick and Melville's life experiences makes it seem like an isolated and less than satisfying existence. Tortured artist and all that.
2. Why doesn't the whale just dive straight down when the harpoon hits? Someone needs to coach those whales up.
3. How do you sign up for a whaling mission when you can't swim? Consider the level of desperation for employment, freedom, adventure, or life fulfillment necessary to step aboard a ship that will travel entire oceans for YEARS without being able to survive if you fall in, an event that is nearly assured to happen in one of those flimsy little boats that actually harpooned the whale. It seems like a mindset modernity can no longer account for, at least not in prep school New England.
4. A whale's life seems like another of God's jokes. An enormous and majestic creature designed entirely to live underwater but has to emerge to the surface to breath air, thus exposing itself to harpoons and boat propellers, and forcing the whale to only achieve half-sleep at any time? Sounds like a Kafka character...
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