“Call me Ishmael” is one of the most famous opening lines to any of the more than 150 million books ever published in recorded history.
I just read it for the first time in the book from which it became famous, “Moby Dick: The Whale” by Herman Melville.
It made me glad and sad at the same time ― glad that I finally tried to read such a classic before I am unable to read anymore but sad because it took me so long to get to it.
First, a full disclosure: I am not a novel reader with apologies to every English literature teacher I ever had. There has been something preternatural in my nature that has dismissed fiction as not being “real” and therefore not worth reading. Somehow and in some way, I convinced myself nonfiction and biographies are more “interesting” because they are “real.” Maybe it is because they are not a figment of some random person’s vivid imagination and ability to string a lot of descriptive phrases together like some TikTok social media influencer nowadays.
The last great classic novel I completed was “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo over a decade ago ― and that was only because a Sunday School teacher in Northern Virginia basically shamed me into reading it by off-handedly commenting one day that a person is not educated until they have read Hugo’s masterpiece.
I made the mistake of reading the full 800-page version that included more than 200 pages of detailed descriptions of the underground water and sewer system of Paris which could have been avoided entirely had I looked more carefully for the abridged version. But I completed it and thought I was the better person for doing so ― just as my Sunday School teacher told me I would.
I have tried and tried to read voluminous works of fiction several times only to get to about page 100 in each and give up. This is at least my fifth time with “Moby Dick.” Everyone kept telling me I had to read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Each time I picked it up, I stopped around page 100 long before finding out who the heck John Galt was.
Aside from the spiritual, theological and humanitarian themes woven throughout his novel, Melville wrote in a clear style which hit my finally mature ear the right way. It didn’t hurt any that he wrote in short chapters ― depending on the edition, there are between 99 and 117 chapters of about three pages each that anyone can consume in small chunks of time.
In Chapter 14, Ishmael notices his new Polynesian friend Queequeg observing his spiritual observance, which, for lack of a better term, he called his “Ramadan.”
“As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.”
If that doesn’t embody the spirit of the American ideal of freedom of religion and expression which had only been enshrined in the U.S. Constitution a mere half-century before “Moby Dick” was released, then nothing will.
What really saddened me was thinking about how great works of literature and art have historically bound nations together based on common threads of universal values and principles ― and comparing that to what is going on with TikTok where anyone with a camera and a warped sense of probity can influence a whole generation of young people into seeing the nation of Israel as the evil Captain Ahab and not as the only beacon of democracy and freedom in the Middle East.
The newly established School for Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) at UNC Chapel Hill offers hope that curious students who attend a large public university can receive the broad classical liberal education that can bind people together instead of indoctrination through identity politics, which has wreaked such enormous divisiveness upon our nation.
Maybe the next generation will be the one to heal our nation instead of being intent on tearing it apart at the seams.
Students may even find out the name “Ishmael” — which literally means “God Hears” from 4,000 years ago in the Old Testament — has something to do with the current strife in the Middle East and Gaza Strip.
I wish I could start my education all over again.
