The Moby-Dick Guy
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Horst Rosenberg
Humanities Department Head
To open with vulnerability, I’m sometimes afraid of being labeled “The Moby-Dick guy”. My speech is peppered with references to the text. My thoughts return to it several times a day. In each of my work and living spaces there is a copy of Moby-Dick within reach and I not-infrequently (a Melvillian double negative, by the way) read a random chapter to pass a few transitional minutes between activities. With all of this borderline obsessive time spent with Melville, I’m nervous that other parts of my personhood will become overshadowed in the minds of others. I’m also nervous that too many references to Moby-Dick will sour the novel in the minds of my peers and prevent them from giving it a try. I suppose I can’t actually hope to avoid being pigeonholed as a Melville-head if I actively worry about the legacy of Melville on a regular basis.
Horst Rosenberg, at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, in front of Lagoda, the largest model ship in the world.
Now that I’ve confessed my fear(s) around this weighty tome and my perceived responsibilities toward it, I can reflect with some more ease on the remarkable real-world connections which I’ve experienced as a direct result of this book. Back in June, nine high school juniors and seniors joined me on a pilgrimage of sorts to Melville’s birthplace in Manhattan. Later in the summer, I journeyed to New Bedford Massachusetts to spend three weeks with scholars and teachers from across the country to devise new ways of teaching Moby-Dick to students approaching the text for the first time. What follows are a few brief sketches of those two journeys and the impact they’ve had on my teaching.
Herman Melville and Walt Whitman never met. This is one of those historical facts which I find enormously frustrating. Both were both born in the summer of 1819. Both lived the majority of their lives in New York. They died within six months of one another. They devoted their lives to the same project; carving out a literary legacy for a new republic which reflected both the optimism of the American experiment and the disappointments of the American experience. I can all but guarantee that they passed one another on the sidewalk at least once. The fact that the authors of Moby-Dick (an easy choice for “Greatest American Novel”) and Leaves of Grass (likewise a contender for “Greatest American Poem”) didn’t interact is a story which feels typical of New York. In a bustling hive of millions, it is astonishingly easy to feel a deep isolation there. As Melville and Whitman both so clearly evidenced though, being on one’s own does not always imply the dejected spiritual state of isolation - rather - it might instead imply the generative and possibility-laden state of solitude. From solitude emerges meditation, creativity, deliberate action, and realization. It was in search of solitude that I brought our Hunting the Whale class to the most populous city in the United States.
Our trip was a four-day blitz of New York which ranged from exploring 19th century tall ships to getting out on the water ourselves. From Lincoln Center to Coney Island - our group crisscrossed three boroughs and interrupted at least one reunion luncheon of the city trash collector’s union. We averaged nine miles of walking each day and found time to hear the New York Philharmonic play Central Park. Somewhere, somehow, in the midst of this exhausting schedule we crafted moments of genuine wonder for ourselves and for one another. Walking through the modernist galleries at the Met we found inner quiet and introspection. Dancing in the courtyard of Lincoln Center to a live bachata band we made new friends and celebrated the end of the school year. Emerging giddily from the Cyclone - a 1927 rollercoaster which is, and I will stand by the point, a poem written in lumber - one student turned to me and announced he experienced a moment of inner peace in the middle of the first drop; a moment which he said he tried to experience with perfect presentness to ensure it didn’t just pass him by. I had thought that shepherding this remarkable group through my favorite novel was the greatest reward possible for the school year. It turned out that taking this hard working, introspective, deeply curious group on the road offered even more than I had initially imagined possible.
I had hardly unpacked from this adventure when it was time to get out my old carpet bag again and hit the road for New Bedford. Perched at the mouth of Buzzard’s Bay, New Bedford remains one of our nation’s great fishing ports. A workaday jumble of houses and cobbled streets with a briny, calloused-handed realness which one misses in many of the neighboring beach towns. Erase from your mind the salmon-colored shorts and out-of-season raw bars of the Cape. New Bedford is a town of cachupa - a Cape Verdean stew of hominy, beans, and pork belly which is an easy metaphor for the cultural mashup of a town descended from the erstwhile crews of the world’s largest whaling fleet. I arrived in New Bedford in a state of nervous excitement. What if the residency wasn’t beneficial to me? What if I didn’t know as much as my fellow attendees who had been teaching this text for decades? What if I hit my breaking point with Melville and never really wanted to read Moby-Dick ever again? These fears were quickly put to rest the moment I entered the New Bedford Whaling Museum. There, underneath the articulated skeletons of a right whale and blue whale (the latter of which is still leaching whale oil) I immediately recognized in my fellow conference attendees not just colleagues, but genuine fellow-travelers on the road through Melville.
Mary K. Bercaw-Edwards PhD leading a whaleboat demonstration for Horst’s cohort
What followed were the most rewarding days of professional development I’ve ever experienced. Working collaboratively on this topic for the first time, I was exposed to new readings of the text, new methods of teaching, new possibilities of coursework which would find immediate application in all of my classes for the coming year. Expertise from Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking, classroom anecdotes from teachers in their fifth decade of exploring this text, insight from working merchant mariners, and last but certainly not least, the opportunity to haul lines and lower boats on the last wooden whaleship on the planet all combined to offer the most intensive possible week of development as a teacher. I came back to Lancaster exhausted from my experience and delighted with the prospect of a new year of teaching ahead.
I frequently tell students that the reason we work together to understand complex texts is that each reader brings something unique to their reading of the text, something which benefits their peers when we share as a group. The same mechanism holds true for teachers of difficult texts - when we work together, we achieve greater outcomes than were possible in isolation. This conference provided exactly the kind of networking, skill-building, and hard-work-worth-doing which teachers at Stone provide for their students every day. I’m immensely grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities which funded this program and inspired (brace yourselves) a sea-change in how I approach this work. As chair of the humanities, I’m going to encourage discipline-specific conference attendance as a key part of developing our truly remarkable crew here at Stone. Once again I learned that experiential education, hard lessons from the road, and late night group projects aren’t just for our students. Exactly as promised, Students at Stone are given these experiences because they are an ideal preparation for life.
Want to learn more about Horst’s classes (or any of our classes)? Email us today at admissions@stoneindependent.org!