I was studying nonfiction writing at NYU a few years ago when I started a project to do all the “old assigned reading.” In other words, all the books I should have read years ago in high school English class.

I didn’t do assigned readings in high school (and that’s how I ended up in the marines, and why I always do assigned readings today (just in case)). While at NYU, on top of the assigned reading for my MFA, I tried to catch up on the stuff I “should have” read beforehand (Anna Karenina, Jane Eyre, Beloved, Madame Bovary, War and Peace, The Awakening, Great Expectations, Grapes of Wrath, etc). Initially I did it for cultural capital–because I didn’t want to look like a rube at some Greenwich Village wine and cheese party. But the classics are a lot less musty than I expected, and soon I was skipping the parties to read them at home and eat cheese and drink wine in the comfort of my underpants.

Covid struck the city. I spent quite a bit of time hiding from the real world as I wrote a third draft of my novel and buried my head in the literature of the past. Then, in April, my father had a stroke and it changed his life and mine. He had made a living as a guitar player, and the stroke paralyzed his right side. I get chills and my eyes fill with tears every time I read that line in Psalm 137: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” (If my father is reading this now, he is rolling his eyes and saying, you you asshole, what about me?)

It wasn’t that I had never seen profound injury before, or even death. But this was my closest relative stricken in such a way that he “forgot his chief joy.” I saw that everything we have in life is borrowed. Even our ego is ours on a loan. There’s nothing we can hold tightly enough to keep.

I knew my father–and the rest of my family–needed me, but I was overwhelmed. It was like the full weight of everything I remembered from Afghanistan and beyond was resting on me all of a sudden, and if it weren’t for the love and patience of my partner Jamie, I don’t know what would have happened to us the winter after my father’s stroke. We all survived, but the more time that passed, the more guilt I felt for not being in contact with Dad, and the harder it became to call him or to plan a visit.

It was during my escapes of the winter of 2020 that I read Moby Dick. I had never been interested in the book. Furthermore, I had read Bartleby the Scrivener, Melville’s most famous short story, and didn’t like it–I thought it was flowery and anticlimactic. I didn’t understand Melville’s sense of humor at that point. I will admit, audience, he was an acquired taste. I may never have acquired the taste for Herman at all if I hadn’t received the book from a friend, who sent me the duplicate copies of some titles in his library.

Once I had the book, I couldn’t deny it was exactly the type of book I’d been setting out to read since I came to NYU. A classic with a forbidding aura–actually, less a book that everyone “should” have read, and more a book that everyone knows despite no one having read it. Mark Twain said of classics, “They are book that everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to read.” I would say that in 2021, a classic is any book that we feel so familiar with it would almost feel redundant to read them. It is usually a very small piece of the “classic” that makes its way into the cultural imagination, and so for me, the fun of reading these familiar books is discovering that these books offer detail, insight, and pleasure far beyond that “one thing” that we as Americans know about, say Moby Dick. We know that Ahab wants to kill the whale and the whale is a symbol.

But I felt an eerie synchronicity from almost the first page. Ishmael, introducing himself to the reader says:

Doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage formed part of the grand program of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States

“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL

“BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN” (p 5).

I note now that themes of fate, of historical actions and lives as performances, are important both to the rest of Moby Dick, and to Shakespeare, who Melville idolized the way I idolize Melville. And while I know there are other important conclusions to be drawn from the history of conflict in Afghanistan, I can’t deny the first reactions to the passage. I felt that Melville not only knew my story presciently, but saw how his story would fit into my life. I thought perhaps that Ishmael went on a whaling voyage for the same reasons I went to Afghanistan. For superficial reasons, sure, but also because it was written up a long time ago by Providence (forgive me my excuses and my feeble conclusion).

Next week, I’m gonna finish talking about Melville and point the way to future topics on The Smoking Lamp Is Lit: Shakespeare, the King James Bible, the way a great work echoes for generations while great authors turn to dust. Herman Melville himself is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx NY. I would love to one day take a sheaf of white construction paper and a box of crayons to his grave and make rubbings of the epitaph in a dozen different colors–but below Herman’s name there is nothing but a blank, unrolled scroll.