Who the hell am I to comment on Moby Dick? I have wanted to read it and now I have.

I haven't read much *about* the book, so I don't really have strong priors. I did read somewhere that the White Whale was nature, and I think that's right. It's full of terrors and our own natural existences (the ship, the body) limit us in dealing with them. Madness and horror abound.

Since I love the dark underbelly (though I think somewhere in here Melville characterizes the underbelly as nearly perfectly white, touche), the whole thing appealed to me.

I won't lie - it was a slog for me. I understood what he was trying to do with all of the relentless detail, or at least I think I do. First, we had to get into the totality of Ahab's obsession, his monomania (and hence, if we took the time to think about it, our own). Second, I think Melville is doing some weird scalar stretching, where the mundane stretches way, way out and the most germane, the pivotal facts of the thing, turn out to be anticlimactic. Perhaps too charitable to (or a bad read of) Melville, but perhaps he's extolling the virtues of attentiveness, given the certainty that it'll end in a flash at some point, and decisively.