Leviathan or The Whale Read Online Free PDF Page B

food, is an excellent medium for the evolution of such huge, long-lived and intelligent animals; an environment in which communication and socializing take the place of material culture. Theirs is a landless race, free from mortgages and fossil fuel, unconstrained by borders or want, content merely to sing and sleep and eat and die.
    It has taken us almost all our existence to come close to the true nature of the whale; only in the last few decades have we come to realize what the whale might be. In the long view of history, it will seem a remarkable turn-around: that a century that began by actively hunting whales ended by passively watching them. Animals, too, have a history–although one we can know only a tiny part of–and while modern science has demystified the whale whilst revealing its true wonders, our attitudes to whales also changed when we came to see them close-up. When, in effect, they became mediated, in photographs, on film, on television, part of our public discourse.
    For the modern world, the whale is a symbol of innocence in an age of threat. It is an animal out of Genesis, a ‘myth of the fifth morning’, in Mary Oliver’s poem, both childlike and reproving. History, on the other hand, saw peril in the great fish that swallowed Jonah, or on which Sinbad found himself, a gigantic whale ‘on whose back the sands have settled and trees have grown since the world was young!’ The ancient writer Lucian told of a whale one hundred and fifty miles long in which was contained an entire nation and men who believed themselves to be dead, years after they were first engulfed. The beast that attacked Andromeda, and which was slain by Perseus, was believed to be a whale. Cetus was sent by Poseidon to consume the young of Ethiopia, only to be turned into a huge rock when it looked at the Medusa–a celestial myth re-enacted each autumn as the whale constellation rears over the southern horizon.
    Although D.H. Lawrence would declare that ‘Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes’, to the Christian era, the whale was the very shape of the Beast of Revelation. In the sixteenth century the metaphysical poet John Donne wrote of a monstrous animal,
    His ribs are pillars, and his high arch’d roofe
Of barke that blunts best steele, is thunder-proofe

    while a continent away in the New World, North-Western American Indians believed that the giant waves that carried away their villages were the backwash of battles between thunderbirds and whales. In the Hindu version of the flood, Vishnu assumes his first avatar in the shape of a great fish with a horn and tows Manu and his ark to safety, and followers of Islam contend that of the ten animals that will enter paradise, one is the whale that swallowed Jonah. Overwhelmingly, however, the modern whale exists in one great image, the looming shape of its most famous incarnation: Moby Dick.
    And the angel of the LORD said to her, ‘Behold, you are with child, and shall bear a son; you shall call his name Ishmael; because the LORD has given heed to your affliction. He shall be a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.’
    Genesis 16:11-12

    Like many people, I found the densely written chapters of Herman Melville’s book difficult to read. I was defeated by its size and scale, by its ambition. It was as incomprehensible as the whale itself. Over the years I’d pick up the book, become engrossed, only for my attention to wander. But after my first visit to New England, I looked at it again; just as I was ready to see whales, I was ready to read
Moby-Dick
.
    Perhaps it was the solace I’d found in reading
Billy Budd, Sailor, & Other Stories
during the endless hours of a transatlantic flight when, despite the darkened cabin and everyone else around me cocooned like larvæ in thin airline blankets, my own eyes resolutely refused to remain