A Whale Of A Book

by Jessie Roberts

& Sons author David Gilbert lovingly describes his favorite chapter from Moby-Dick, “The Grand Armada”:

I know it makes no sense, or comes across as pretentious nonsense, but so often when reading this book I find myself on the verge of tears and I have no idea why. A lost world perhaps? A striving for connection? A certain secular religiosity. No matter, the whales are doomed. They form a circle, circles within circles, like a clockwork mechanism in fin and tale, and the smaller boats lower into the water and go about their true business, the killing of whales, darting the weaker ones, taking advantage of mammalian affinities and loyalties, maiming as many as possible. And it is within this shoal that Starbuck and Queequeg and Ishmael find their boat inadvertently pushed into the very innermost circle, what Ishmael compares to a valley lake, “the enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion,” and it is this moment in Moby-Dick that I reflect on most often, that living wall of whales and the pastoral scenes glimpsed beneath.

All this violence, all this blood, and yet, for a moment, small tame cows and calves, “the women and children of this routed host,” visit the side of the unexpected boat and accept pats and scratches from Queequeg and Starbuck. They are the innocent, the cherished, the ones being protected by the larger herd from “learning the precise cause of its stopping.” And then Ishmael looks down into the water and

…far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes…for, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to be mother. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; — even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight.

A bit of Gulfweed, that’s what they are — what we are. It is that moment of calm and metaphysical understanding, the divide between the spirit and the body and the near constant human attempt to bring those polarities together, that plus the sentimentality of the scene, of these mothers and children, these whales, resigned yet not uncaring, making due with the cruelty of the distant stars, just slays me.