I was going to write a bit of a rant here but then something kind of dawned on me. This kind of conversation won't even exist in about 40 years or so. Once the final generation of people born before or during the digital age transition die off, that's it. There will be no living testament to any of this. It's so generationally specific as to make it almost completely pointless.
Instead I want to comment on your statement about the digressions in Moby Dick. Despite my first degree 20 years ago being a Ba. in English lit, I never actually read MD until about 5 years ago. I was completely surprised to discover that this book, which had been forever and a day been marketed as being about a whale hunt, was really more about the whaling industry, international trade, and the British empire. And it was damn interesting, if not particularly useful (conversational level amber gris knowledge in 2024 doesn't have a lot of marketable opportunities). If I were to have read the book without any prior influence I would not have imagined the Ahab/MD story as the entirety of the novel, but rather one component of the world presented through Ishmael's eyes.
For me, MD without the "digressions" isn't even MD.
>>Once the final generation of people born before or during the digital age transition die off, that's it. There will be no living testament to any of this. It's so generationally specific as to make it almost completely pointless.
In a word: exactly.
If you haven't ever read it, I might recommend Melville's White-Jacket, the book he published right before Moby-Dick. It's about life aboard a naval vessel (as opposed to a whaler) and is sort of what you'd get if you abridged Moby-Dick by cutting out everything BUT the digressionary chapters.
I was going to write a bit of a rant here but then something kind of dawned on me. This kind of conversation won't even exist in about 40 years or so. Once the final generation of people born before or during the digital age transition die off, that's it. There will be no living testament to any of this. It's so generationally specific as to make it almost completely pointless.
Instead I want to comment on your statement about the digressions in Moby Dick. Despite my first degree 20 years ago being a Ba. in English lit, I never actually read MD until about 5 years ago. I was completely surprised to discover that this book, which had been forever and a day been marketed as being about a whale hunt, was really more about the whaling industry, international trade, and the British empire. And it was damn interesting, if not particularly useful (conversational level amber gris knowledge in 2024 doesn't have a lot of marketable opportunities). If I were to have read the book without any prior influence I would not have imagined the Ahab/MD story as the entirety of the novel, but rather one component of the world presented through Ishmael's eyes.
For me, MD without the "digressions" isn't even MD.
>>Once the final generation of people born before or during the digital age transition die off, that's it. There will be no living testament to any of this. It's so generationally specific as to make it almost completely pointless.
In a word: exactly.
If you haven't ever read it, I might recommend Melville's White-Jacket, the book he published right before Moby-Dick. It's about life aboard a naval vessel (as opposed to a whaler) and is sort of what you'd get if you abridged Moby-Dick by cutting out everything BUT the digressionary chapters.