PLOWING through Moby-Dick my senior year of college, I found a reading chair in a well-lit corner of the library where I could sit uninterrupted for hours, readjusting my posture at various times, convinced that with each redistribution of my weight on one leg, one side, I might experience improved focus. I was chapters behind, having procrastinated the previous two weeks’ readings, and now, here I was, confined to the library, tucked beside the main stacks, desperate for a friend to walk by and distract me or suggest we stroll to the vending machine for Peanut M&M’s.
The day progressed. The library’s quiet came to be its own noise. Like artificial silence forged from real silence. Sham silence. Like everybody in a library is playing pretend—which in college is not entirely untrue. But isn’t that often the case inside spaces where quiet is enforced? How the absence of sound produces a sonic texture in and of itself? I considered leaving at one point because reading so much, so closely, and not merely for pleasure is deranging. Sentences begin to float off the page and my focus becomes unfaithful, and the book starts to flop like a fainted body.
As daylight waned and disappeared, and the air inside felt wired, I nearly dozed off. I’d read a couple hundred pages and decided that after this chapter, the book’s eighty-seventh—“The Grand Armada”—I’d stop. In this chapter, the Pequod discovers a pod of many whales, including several pregnant female whales. Some have just given birth to infant whales, and are nursing them while surveying the Pequod. Like planets with eyes.
The “little infants” are described as “frisky,” having scarcely recovered from that “irksome position [they] had so lately occupied,” writes Melville, “in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow.” Their crumpled fins are likened to a newborn baby’s ear, and at one point, Starbuck notices how one young cub is still tethered to the mother’s umbilical cord. Long coils of it. A “natural line” snared with the Pequod’s own rope.
I’m reading and imagining the umbilical cord, and the cub, and the mother, all of it, in “that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion,” and I’m picturing the satiny surface of the sea, how it’s dark and blue as if promising rare secret moments like this to happen in its shadowy depths, and I finish the chapter and look up from my page and then down at the library’s carpet beneath my feet, and there, coiled and dragging, is a cord. Lengths of it, looping and alive. Winding. Tangled. The janitor has started vacuuming. The library will soon close for the night.