“Let’s talk about Chapter 3,” said Ethan.
“The rooming house.”
“The house of little to no rooms.”
“Ah, yes.”
“I thought it was interesting that it started out basically with a description of a painting.”
“Right,”
“Like, he’s so eager and overrun, running himself ragged, trying to find a place to sleep.”
“Right.”
“He finally enters, and instead of going right into it, up to the front desk to question the landlord about an available room, it’s all about addressing the painting.”
“There’s this non-urgency.”
“It arrests him, and he forgets about the bare minimum—”
“Bare necessities.”
“Not even they compare to a painting, maybe is the message.”
“Right, so is that the point Melville’s trying to make? That people will give up basic needs when faced with ideas, their ideas, their art.”
“The starving artist.”
“Right, maybe he’s trying to say that there’s little that matters more than what’s warranted.”
“Sorry, you lost me.”
“He uses the word unwarranted to describe the ambition of a young artist driven by the need to ‘delineate.’”
“‘Chaos bewitched,’” said Ethan. “To capture it, preserve it, no matter how unattainable may be the ‘wild’ thing, near impossible, borderline crazy.”
“Yeah, any way, it seemed like a whole lot of beating around the bush to get to what’s at the center.”
“The whale.”
“Right,” said Levi. “I don’t really know if the painting’s so important. But, maybe it is. We won’t know until we know. My inkling is it’s supposed to represent this book, some stuff at the fringes, but the scene of the whale at the center, so basically, foreshadowing.”
“I feel like there are a few impaled whales in our future as readers.”
“Right, well at least one.”
“What I did find interesting was,” said Ethan. “The line about time, the ‘breaking up of the ice-bound stream of Time’.”
“Mmm.”
“Yeah, the idea that time, which I equate with imagination and memory, is fractured, fragmented. I feel like I relate to that,” said Ethan. “I don’t think of things linearly, even things that have yet to come to pass. There are like these glimmers, almost like the sun refracting through water. It’s like time itself or maybe just my attention span bends to this or that, and the littlest thing is cause for the cut to. It’s like a cut to shot in a movie or something whose scenes are totally out of order.”
“Do you think it just has to do with association?”
“Huh, yeah, associative memory.”
“I don’t know how it all works up there, but everything is connected and subconscious until it isn’t.”
“Yeah.”
“Any way…”
“What I also thought was interesting was the description of the whale in the painting.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he describes the whale as purposefully springing upon the harpoon.
“Where?” Levi said, as Ethan guided him to the bottom of paragraph three.
“It says, the ‘exasperated whale, purposing to spring…is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.’ I read that, and I was wondering if this whale was suicidal.”
“Hmm, I think ‘spring clean over the craft’ is the important part of the sentence. The whale has this ultimate aim to clear the ship, but he can’t do it. Instead, he impales himself. I believe it’s inadvertent.”
“Why do I always read it wrong.”
“Come on, you don’t always do anything.”
“I definitely miss the details that make a big difference.”
“You’re just a fast reader.”
“It’s like I’m a skimmer, I skim.”
“Speaking of birds,” said Levi. “Do you want to go check up on the baby owl?”
“I would,” said Ethan. “But I have to go meet Samantha.”
“Alright.”