The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

EXCEPT FOR Don Quixote, Clarissa, and In Search of Lost Time, my personal favorite among all prose epics or vast novels is Moby-Dick. I have loved it since I was a child and have never given up my passionate conviction that Ahab is more a hero than a hero-villain.

I cannot recall how many times I have taught Moby-Dick. Though I keep rereading it, I have most of it by heart, and that possession alters my perception of many other books. With Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, it is for me a kind of American Scripture. One does not want to lose perspective. Whitman and Melville are the two titans of American literature. Neither of them is Isaiah of Jerusalem or Dante. Homer and the Athenian tragic dramatists, Plato and Pindar, Lucretius and Virgil, are also larger on the scale of the Sublime. Very old age plays its tricks upon even a mind passionate for the survival of aesthetic and cognitive values. I read Walt Whitman and he places his hand upon me and says he wants me to be his poem. I go back to the first chapter of Moby-Dick, "Loomings," and become Ishmael: Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.