Loading…
8
Gave up on Moby Dick twice in my 20s, finished it last month at 54, and the waiting was the best part
I tried to read Moby Dick back in 1999 when I was 23 and got stuck around the whale anatomy chapters, tried again at 38 and gave up even sooner. Last month I picked up the same beat up paperback I have moved across four states and read the whole thing in eleven days, mostly waiting in my truck between stops. Did anyone else need to get older before a hard book finally made sense, or was it a different thing that got you through it?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
oliviabennett20h ago
The part about reading it in your truck between stops really gets me, because I think that's the real secret nobody talks about. It's not just getting older, it's having the kind of time where you're stuck somewhere with nothing else to do but sit with a book. In my 20s I was always rushing to finish things so I could say I read them, and that's the worst way to read Melville. He wrote half that book like he was just killing time on a ship, rambling about whale blubber and rope, and you have to be bored enough yourself to actually enjoy it. Your version of bored happened to come with a job and a truck, mine came from a long winter with no cable, but either way the book needs you to slow down to its speed. I bet the whale chapters you hated at 23 are the ones you liked best this time around.
3