The White Whale Still Calls

Moby Dick Celebrates Its 173rd Birthday

Finishing my Coast to Coast hike in Robin Hood’s Bay where I left my copy of Moby Dick!

Let us speak of the greatest American novel ever written, Moby Dick, published 173 years ago this week.

The book has played a critical role in my life three times.

First, during college, the first time I read it in the class of my mentor, a wonderfully peculiar professor by the name of Zan Robinson. Zan taught me the most important lesson I’ve ever learned about writing that I still carry with me today, that “art is collaboration.”

“Learn that and you’ll succeed,” he’d say. “Go it alone, and you’ll fail.”

Zan gave me Melville, and if he had done nothing else in my life, that alone would have been enough.

Second, the book was a traveling companion with me on my life changing cross country hike from coast to coast in England. It fed me for two weeks. At the end of the hike, in an old bed and breakfast in Robin Hood’s Bay, I wrote a greeting on the inside cover and left the book in a bookshelf there, just under a window overlooking the North Sea.

And finally, in January and February of 2015, the book held the most importance to my life when Moby Dick became the first book I read out loud to my infant daughter. We’d sit in my library - she, tucked into the crook of one arm, the book in my other hand. We rocked and I read and she fell asleep to the greatest adventure every written.

And so, let us celebrate the delicious and dangerous pull of unknown places, the desire to look out into the unknown and be afraid yet go forward anyway. Let us celebrate how words can bring us life, can elevate us or can destroy us; how a century and a half old book continues to inspire and intrigue.

“I try all things, I achieve what I can,” Melville wrote. Keep trying friends, and let us know if you’ve read Moby Dick.

Reading Moby Dick to one month old Little Bean.