Every Good Morning

For audio version click here How does one come to a comprehensive understanding of mysterious Ahab, a man dismembered, besieged by blasphemous insights, a prisoner of his own self-imposed solitude, a living force isolated by a brilliant mind focused on the annihilation of a “great, gliding demon?” Contemptuous of all dogmas and fearless, he believes that “the right worship is defiance (725).”* Once begun, there can be no turning back – his pride will be […]

For audio version click here Ahab is the soul of Moby Dick, but the physical and symbolic reality of the whale gives us the core ideas of the book. No other novel in American literature presents us with a more complex, poetic, and convincing portrait of a species or of an individual creature. The White Whale is the object of desire, the ferocious grail of Ahab’s quest. He takes arms and legs, drags boatloads of men into […]

For audio version click here Walk 25 yards north from the house and you enter a pasture open to this Autumn’s wide blue sky. Pause now, back to the house, and close your eyes. Conjure your powers of banishment. Imagine yourself an exile from 2012. Banish the lawnmowers and leaf-blowers shuddering close-by. Banish the streaming traffic from Holmes Road. Make it a dirt road. Now you can hear the wind. Now you can hear yourself think. In […]