Etymology

[ISHMAEL, spoken]

“The pale usher, threadbare in coat and heart and body and brain, I see him now.”

That’s the first line of my favorite book. Though, there’s a chapter titled before it: Etymology (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School). I in my head always pictured the usher looking like my uncle. A stout, hunched over old man with glasses scooting about an enormous library all oak and marble, and he’s dusting his old lexicons and grammars with a queer handkerchief. He works there with his buddy, a grub-worm of a poor devil of a sub-sub librarian who looks like my uncle’s oldest and dearest friend. Just two old fellas, spending their days cataloging their books and bickering like an old married couple about which ones belong in the hallowed canon of great literature while the busts of great white men loom over them

Like an old married couple

Actually before the etymology there’s the contents! And before that, there’s an inscription
“A token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

Melville met Hawthorne in the summer of 1850 as he was finishing the book. The two men lived in the Berkshires just six miles from each other. They met at a hiking party climbing Monument Mountain. Apparently they shared a bottle of champagne and took to each other immediately. They became close, close friends, getting together all the time, drinking, smoking and talking about writing and America. They shared a legendary correspondence. Melville was almost certainly in love with him

After he read Hawthorne, he was moved to write something strong and subversive, Biblical and Shakespeareian, American and great. A wicked book, broiled in hellfire and baptized in the name of the devil. But when the book first came out it was a bomb. Sold less than four thousand copies in Melville's lifetime. He wrote to Hawthorne:
“Though I wrote the gospels in this century, I shall die in the gutter.”

But Hawthorne had started to withdraw. A few months later he moved away, dissolving whatever relationship the two men had. Melville burned all of Hawthorne’s letters. He died forty years later, unhappily married, having lost two sons to sickness and suicide. He spent his last years working in a customs office, poor and unread. Threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain

It’s been a couple of hard years for me. I lost someone. Uh. I’m just-

I don’t really feel safe in this country right now. I’m just not really sure who I am and how I fit. But I come back to this book whenever I need to lose myself in something and remember what a beautiful sprawling mess this country can be. The great democracy of the whaleship. Only, in my head, I can cast the Pequod as the America I want to see

Before we start, I want to acknowledge that we’re on the traditional territory of the Massachusett tribe. They stewarded this land for thousands of years before the invaders came. After Harvard was founded in 1636 they established an Indian college with a pledge to educate and Christianize the native population. They even translated and printed a Massachusett Bible on the first printing press in America, just a few blocks from here. The college closed in 1693 due to lack of enrollment

Alright, let’s do this

Call me Ishmael