Rediscovered Newspapers

            Sometime in the early spring of 2017, I was asked by my teacher for an American Literature class to pick a book from American history to write a book review on. The class was given a few examples of appropriate books and authors, and then we were all taken to the school library to browse- though most people would still take another day or two to settle on a book. I, on the other hand, was fairly certain which book I wanted to read as soon as our teacher described the assignment. I asked to double-check that the book would fill the assignment’s requirements, and then that afternoon, I checked out a copy of Moby Dick by Herman Melville from the school library. At that time, it had been quite a while since I had read a book for anything other than a school assignment, and even longer since I had really let myself become absorbed in a book. I decided that I wanted to read Moby Dick because I wanted to challenge myself, and I also wanted to really enjoy whatever book I was going to read for this assignment.

I have always loved books about the ocean; growing up on an island and going on fishing trips with my family every year probably has had a lot to do with that. The book that stood out to me the most before I read Moby Dick was The Old Man and the Sea, which my dad gave me a copy of after a particularly exciting fishing trip. I remember hoping that Moby Dick would be similar to The Old Man and The Sea, and be able to capture my attention as completely. I was eager to start reading. My final class for the day was a peer tutoring class, so while I waited to see if anyone needed help, I sat in a chair in the corner and pulled the book out of my backpack. I remember sitting there and having a rather conflicted first impression of Moby Dick- for the first couple of chapters, I found myself slowly reading through multiple pages only to pause and realize that I remembered nothing of what those pages had been about- I was going backwards constantly, wading through what felt like a hazy entanglement of adjectives and run-on sentences which started at one thought and ended in a completely different manner entirely. I appreciated the writing but also felt like I was reading less of a novel and more of a flood of vocabulary and figurative language somehow contained within a book. The whole experience was rather bewildering.

Luckily, that all changed rather abruptly towards the end of the class, when I started reading the first page of chapter three. It starts off seemingly no different from the first two chapters- the plot is being moved forward by a vivid description of the sights that Ishmael comes across as he enters the Spouter-Inn. However, the second sentence of this chapter is another one of those run-on sentences, this time about a peculiar oil painting hung on the wall.

“On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose.”

This one sentence seemed so confusedly yet artfully crafted to me that I immediately became more focused on the words I was reading- and I was shocked to find that, rather than moving deeper into the Inn, the next two or three pages were all about this single oil painting. Some of the phrases used to describe this painting have stuck with me for years, for example: “Some ambitious young artist […] had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched.”, “A long, limber, portentous, black mass of something […] floating in a nameless yeast.”, and, perhaps the most hilarious and impactful to me, “A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.” I’m certain that I honestly laughed when I read that sentence. I mean, really! Boggy? Soggy? Squitchy?! It was while I was reading this- this scrambled mess of adjectives, commas, and strung-together descriptions of this oil painting, culminating in an utterly beautiful, absolute idea of this image- that I compared Melville’s writing to poetry. I loved it.

This painting has no real impact on the story of Moby Dick– it’s never mentioned again in the entire book. Despite this, nearly three pages are completely dedicated to its description, to wrapping it in emotion and meaning, to describing it with metaphors and beautiful language and alliteration and rhymes and what honestly felt to me at times like iambic pentameter. The experience of reading about this painting felt nearly hypnotic- when I finished these pages, I found myself turning them back again not because I could not recall what I had read, but because I felt enamored and driven to glean any extra bit of meaning from those pages, and to just appreciate the depth of the descriptions that Melville incorporated into this story. It felt not just like poetry, but also similar in some ways to The Old Man and the Sea, though in ways I had not expected. I remember that at times The Old Man and the Sea felt like it could stretch the minutes of time passing in the story into hours- each mundane detail and action described on one level or another. Moby Dick felt like it took this absolute devotion to detail and made it something divine. The painting was not just described as something that was there, it was attention-grabbing, to both the reader and the protagonist. It was twisted and puzzling and dark and beautiful. It was the first thing in years that had made me truly remember how much I love reading.

I remember how, for that whole afternoon, I was absolutely clamoring to share these pages with anyone who would listen. I stuttered out of excitement as I read, and repeated the words boggy and squitchy far too many times. I don’t think anyone I read to appreciated how absurd and marvelous those words were to me. I used to love reading, especially fiction and fantasy where you can wrap yourself in a world and all its details. For the first couple of years of high school, though, I was reading mostly autobiographies or memoirs with very little creative language, and nothing to lose myself in imagining. This moment of reading the third chapter of Moby Dick in a quiet classroom, absorbed in beautiful descriptions, was a rediscovery of my love for reading and writing. Perhaps it’s not the most impactful moment in my literacy history- but I certainly doubt I would still have such a drive for reading without it. I don’t think I can find anything to read in the future will ever compare to that boggy, soggy, squitchy picture- though I will certainly try.