Moby Dick reception experiences, part #2, was that a English PhD student I knew at university came up to me at the bar to chat pretty much unpromptedly about his Moby Dick dissertation, which was about whether the text of Moby Dick, itself, could be considered as written on the surface of a whale, and then said to me very earnestly: “and thinking about this book, I realise I’ve had a very privileged life. I’ve studied a lot, I’ve travelled, I’ve eaten good food…but what I’ve never done is suffered. I want to know real suffering…I want to go somewhere and experience, genuinely experience suffering….do you have any ideas about how I should go about it?”
“written on the surface of a whale” would be a very limited edition
Mooncustafer 