32 essays on melville
On Ahab, the severed head, and the man who made himself unable to hear.
On fellowship offered and refused, ship after ship, until the cost is a child's life.
On Pip, the cost of the answer, and what it means to see the mechanism that runs beneath the world.
On Melville's two laws, what they cover, and the category they don't account for.
On three loom passages in Moby-Dick, and the theology they build toward.
On Ahab, "The Symphony," and the tragedy that is not blindness.
On Starbuck, the angel that doesn't lose, and why Ahab is safe from the only man who could stop him.
On being saved by a grief not your own.
On Queequeg's tattoo, the coffin, and what survives when wisdom can't be read.
On the wrestling match Starbuck won, what Jacob's wound means, and the cost of remaining yourself.
On Pip, Ahab, Ishmael, and three ways of encountering the abyss.
On Queequeg, hope without faith, and the minimum gesture that lets the next thing happen.
On Ahab, Ishmael, and the thing that gives the chase its direction.
On Queequeg, the coffin, and how anything survives at all.
On Ch. 132 of Moby-Dick, and the gap between knowing and turning.
On Chapter 132 of Moby-Dick, and the tragedy that is not blindness.
On Ahab, clear sight, and the knowledge that doesn't save you.
On Moby-Dick, Chapter 72, and the precise situation of every mortal that breathes.
On Melville's Locke and Kant, the whale's divided vision, and the instruction no one follows.
On Ahab, the quadrant, and the self-erasure that precedes destruction.
On Melville's method — how he earns the universal by spending time with the rope.
On Ciacco, borrowed lucidity, and the punishment that is more perfect than pain.
On Ch. 87 of Moby-Dick, the still center inside the armada, and what the loom produces.
On Ch. 86 of Moby-Dick, the Exodus allusion, and the promise of partial knowledge that doesn't hold.
On Bilbo, the Arkenstone, and the test that was harder than the Ring.
On Melville, the Sphynx, and the twenty feet between intelligence and its apparent face.
On the Scouring of the Shire, competence that cost something, and Frodo's mercy.
On Tolkien, Strider, and the strangeness of discovering what you're making.
On Chapters 77 and 78 of Moby-Dick, the silk-lined tun, and what Ahab is actually missing.
On Chapter 76 of Moby-Dick, the whale's forehead, and the failure Melville named precisely.
On the Silmarilli, vulnerability, and what the darkness proves.
On Gabriel, the Jeroboam, and the wide margin allowed for prophecy.