According to Storygraph, it has been five months since I finished Moby Dick, a book I put on the audio version of because I needed something that would wash over me inanely in the car. I could not have expected just how much some pieces of it would live with me.
For instance, it's midday in December and outside the trees are covered in snow, and for reasons inexplicable I am thinking about Chapter 69*: The Funeral. I listened to it around midnight last July, and I just reread it, and dear god but it's an exquisitely built 430 words. Ishmael wants us to know what a whale corpse looks like, colossal and floating and white. Ishmael needs us to know how infinitely long it lingers, something that big, swarmed and alone, present even once it's picked incrementally into a shell of itself. Maybe especially then. How one ship that doesn't even know what it's avoiding from afar will pass information along so that for years after everyone will do the same, even when nothing is there anymore, even when what was there held more pity than danger in the first place. all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago, Ishmael will tell us eventually, but first he shows me a whale corpse and whispers in my ear in a dark sweltering midnight, are you a believer in ghosts, my friend?
Anyway. It's five months later on a bright white midday, I have a cup of coffee and I'm thinking about that. There's no reason to. It's not relevant. But I think about it a lot. It lingers. I guess what I'm saying is that when I typed live with me at the top of this post, I probably used the wrong phrase.
