Years ago I wrote a poem after reading Moby Dick.

Dear Ishmael

Do you regret spending your life trapped in a classic?

No beer pong, no Jimmy Fallon, no elephants?

The cannibal's tattoos have spread to people you wouldn't believe,

but I'll grant you, we live too much in the news:

the watery part of the world has swallowed an airplane,

all the great glaciers are on the move.

Your captain never let go of the horizon.

The gold nailed to the mast was never a young lady's heart.

God played in the rigging. Shakespeare taught you everything.

A little George Carlin would have lightened the load.

Greenpeace would love to ask you for money.

Oh, Ishmael, come home!

Give your sister a hug.

Play the new zombie game with your son.

Leave some footprints in the sand.

Not a word after "The End."

Maybe your genius is for not sharing.

You never told us your last name.

Your family could have been anyone's.

To launch myself into 2026, an annus horribilis from the start, I reread Moby Dick back in January. I'm rereading it still as this year continues to teeter between worse and worst. It's my tonic to despair.

I wanted to believe that America is more than a cruel clown show, more than an empire in decline, more than the daily hurricane of headlines that would be absurdly funny on the Jon Stewart show if they weren't reporting real human suffering. I wanted to believe in the America that boards Herman Melville's Pequod for its voyage into grandeur and doom.

Within pages, I made a startling discovery: my poem got this novel completely wrong. My ruefulness, my laments: maybe "Dear Ishmael" did a good job of capturing my own sense of regrets as a middle-aged man, but it wildly missed the essential spirit of Moby Dick. There is no FOMO in Ishmael. Despair, yes, exuberance, plenty. He runs the gamut of emotions at Shakespearean scale. But never does he launch into recounting the next episode in his adventure or pause to inform us of some crucial facts about whales and whaling without the sense that he's living his life to its fullest. No regrets, no envy of others. He's not a bystander to history or current events. He rushes forward like a focal lens taking in the buzzing vitality of the human endeavor on a planet that both loves us and hates us. He learns his lessons, he faces the great mysteries. His life matters to him in ways I often wish mine mattered to me. Moby Dick, I realized, is a manual for living.

Not until the early 1920s, thirty years after Melville died in obscurity, did critics begin to promote Moby Dick as the classic it has become. (D.H. Lawrence was among the first to read it as a novel about America itself.) Upon publication in 1851, it was treated as a disappointment by a popular adventure writer. The problem for skeptics, as Geoffrey Sanborn notes in The Value of Herman Melville, was the novel's "extravagance," its much-too-muchness, its overload. (Really? An entire chapter about rope?) Anyone who has failed to make it through Moby Dick will know whereof those skeptics spoke. And in fairness, much of the fiction we've read for our whole lives abides by Hemingway's notion that in fiction as in icebergs, seven-eighths of it should remain beneath the surface. It's the power of omission that captures our imaginations. And perhaps because we're saturated in psychology we believe the same of ourselves, our motives, our desires, our raw animal selves hidden from us in our subconscious. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the template for the modern novel of private suffering and quiet tragedy, was published only six years after Moby Dick. Two different trajectories for fiction: one life-like, one life-enhancing.

Take the events of the day. We all have them, some notable, most not. The first fiction in fiction is that these events can be streamlined into a coherent, compelling story. But Ishmael doesn't really pass through the events of the day. He turns everything into an intense experience, an encounter with reality that verges on revelation. There's grandeur to be found in places we'd never think to look. About that rope Melville writes (and anyone who writes about Melville is probably better off just quoting Melville):

"Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit – strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish? – Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in the hangman's nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you might say.

"Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for those repeated whaling disasters – some few of which are casually chronicled – of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boar is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning; and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.

" ... But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in a whale boat you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side."

A description of whaling? A sermon about life and fate? A prescient analysis of where we stand in 2026? All of the above and more? Now you can understand why I keep reading Moby Dick for lightning bolts of hope.

For years, The Great Gatsby has been the novel close to my heart. (See rueful lament above.) Like Nick Carraway I come from longstanding American families, the WASP heritage with its reserve and sense of privileged social obligations. Like Gatsby I've been stupid blind with love (but not always thankfully). Yet Ishmael and Moby Dick are what I need now. The exuberance. The vitality. The humor in the early pages along with the kinship and admiration shown Queequeg and the other shipmates from diverse backgrounds. (Not for Pete Hegseth this crew of non-Christian non-white men.) The shameless passion for knowledge as Ishmael shares all he knows about whales. The ongoing speeches and ruminations about what it all means.

A podcaster recently compared Melville to Nietzsche. It's not that these men have learned that God doesn't exist. (Plenty of us live happily enough as atheists.) It's that they're furious at God for not existing. Maybe that's my fury, too, not at God, but at America for not existing as once promised. But here's the final thing about Ishmael: he lives to tell the tale.