Flu and its books 1

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Nothing better that some flu to appreciate life (admittedly once you start recovering) and make a dent in the huge pile of books that one has accumulated for those days when the fire is on, and friends, now absent, have left behind a good bottle of Martel.

The books I went through in the last few days are pure gems.

Moby Dick. Shame on me for having reached this age without having actually read this classic before.

This is epics at its best, literature of the finest kind. Some of the fights are Homeric, and meant to be so. There is an endless amount of information on whaling (you can tell Melville knew about it first hand) and some amazing arguments about how whales will never become extinct, even if, already in the middle of the nineteenth century, whole fleets were systematically clearing the sea of this extraordinary animal. The Japanese should definitely use Moby Dick to support their "scientific", inhumane, cruel massacres.

The book is too full of images, reflections on life, subtle references to other literary styles and narratives, allegories and metaphors, science and trade details to be even summarised here. The usual Wikipedia does an excellent job. So let me just add a few remarks.

You can read the book as a philosophical treatise. Among other things, it is full of references to actual philosophy and philosophers. What philosophy Melville actually endorsed is not entirely clear, but it would be worth exploring.

There is a romantic sense of titanic, Manichean fighting between good and evil and all life-constraints, that is breath-taking. You're actually feeling the pulsing passion, the tensed nerves, the blood rushing, the excitement and dynamism against the inescapable and yet still fought-against destiny, the struggle that makes man so different from any other animal.

It is not a struggle to know what is possible, what might be the case, but a fight to withstand the inevitable, to delay the already-seen, to rush towards the fast-approaching end. If you have seen 300, then compare Ahab to Leonidas. It's simply magnificient. Just the description of what White can mean (recall: Moby Dick is the White Whale), as a scary colour, is in itself an amazing accomplishment.

Moby Dick is life at its rawest.

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