Editor’s Note: This is a letter The Dial received from an alumnus in response to the Moby Dick editorial published in our October issue.

To The Editors of The Dial & The Faculty of the Department of English,

It was my recent pleasure this Thanksgiving to visit campus. Just as I was wondering what alma mater’s current students were up to, I serendipitously stumbled across a copy of The Dial, a publication for which I had the honor of serving as Opinions Editor, many years ago. I read, with great consternation, Matthew Bonanno’s excellent article on cutting Moby-Dick from the curriculum. I write to add my voice to his, and to tell you what my struggles and triumphs with that book meant to me.

As I began my senior year, I had a poor estimation of my own powers as a student of English. I had received middling grades over the course of my English career at Hackley, and I looked toward reading Moby-Dick with fear and loathing. I knew I was no match for a book that monstrous, that untamed, that laden with erudition and saturated with meaning and depth. What Melville and Dr. Robinson taught me was that I had more scholarly potential in me than I could see or even imagine at the time.

My study of Moby-Dick impressed upon me several pieces of profound wisdom that have stayed with me over all the years since that fateful recitation of AP English 12. Most importantly to me, Moby-Dick teaches the lesson of the multivalence of truth. Melville is trying to tell us that Ahab’s quest after the white whale is folly. Truth cannot be got at in so direct a manner; one cannot attempt to stare God in the face and expect enlightenment to follow. If not by sailing her down in the Pequot and ensnaring her in harpoon lines, how then should we try to approach the quest for truth, for knowledge? Melville, by oscillating through different characters’ narrative points of view (Ishmael, Ahab, Starbuck), by oscillating through different rhetorical styles (romanticism, realism, technicalism), and even by oscillating through various narrative forms (first-person narration, third person narration, Shakespearean soliloquy, dramatic dialogue), is telling us that it is wisest to attempt to approach truth not in a headstrong, monomaniacal rush, but by a careful study of complementary frames-of-reference and differing points of view.

This type of frame-shifting approach to the quest for truth is exactly embodied in Hackley’s traditional course of liberal arts education. Abraham Lincoln’s speeches can tell you something deep and true about the world, as can the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, as can the axioms of Euclid, as can Black-Sholes econometric regressions, as can the dialogues of Plato and the treatises of Aristotle. These were all things that I was exposed to at Hackley, and my understanding only grew as I engaged more deeply with them in college, and in law school, and in my private studies and reading. Melville knew that a varied course of liberal learning is the surest path to true understanding; why else would he so generously salt his novel with references to, inter alia, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Thirty Years War, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, “the tempestuous wind called Euroclydion,” and a good deal of amateur cetology? Melville was (perhaps wittingly, perhaps unwittingly) one of the great advocates of liberal education in the American canon, the very sort of education Hackley has a proud tradition of instilling in her students.

The time will come, when you move beyond the hallowed halls of Hackley and the even grander halls of your colleges and universities, when you will become engaged in the work of the professions you choose. It will attempt to lay claim upon all your time and efforts, to the exclusion of all other things. Melville taught me to resist the temptation to be a good corporate lemming and stake my reputation, my ego, my whole conception of self on that one big sale, that one important promotion, that one consequential court case. Melville taught me that there are many roads to self-cultivation and the cultivation of the mind. To seize upon one, to the exclusion of all others, is the road of monomania that leads to the palace of hubris and ultimately seats one on a throne of ruin. Take a little Shakespeare here, and from it, take some truth about the human heart. Take a Vermeer there, and from it take some truth about proportion, grace and aesthetic balance. Take the Phaedrus, and from it take some truth about the nature of moral good. The goal is a well-rounded mind, and a well-cultivated soul (monomaniacs are dreary bores). “Tell me, O Muse, of that many-sided hero,” wrote Homer, in Butler’s translation of The Odyssey. “The man of many devices,” goes Murray’s reading. “Genius versatile,” Cowper calls it, and former Duke University President Richard Brodhead renders it as “I sing of the man, skilled in all forms of competing.” This is Odysseus, Melville’s model man (recast as Ishmael), capable of appreciating all of the different paths to enlightenment, and he is the model of the man Melville and Dr. Robinson helped me to become many years ago in that English classroom.

To those with the power to make such a decision, I implore you: to excise Moby-Dick from the curriculum would be error. I did not think that I was up to the challenge of a book so complex when I began. But the otherworldly power of that book is that it elevates and ennobles its readers by the very difficulty of the challenge it poses. It shaped the contours of who I was as a young scholar, and continues to shape my values years later, when the Hilltop seems sometimes no more than a distant memory. The gift Hackley gave me was Moby-Dick; do not deprive your students of a reading so challenging, a contest so emboldening, and prize so very valuable.

With best regards,

Andrew B. F. Carnabuci ‘02