We’ve been talking a lot about noticing the moments when Moby Dick puts us to sleep and then pulls us out of that boredom and trying to discover why is it that the book is formed this way. I think the end of Chapter 98 gives us one possible answer to this:

“Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when–There she blows!–the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again” (469).

The constant jump from pillaging one captured and slain whale to immediately hunting another is representative of the flow of life as a whole. We hardly have time to fully invest ourselves into extracting the small but valuable sperm from this world’s vast bulk when another call prevents us from even fully cleansing ourselves of the task at hand. It’s nearly impossible now for us to just sit and digest something without the endless media and entertainment fighting for our attention. So to see Melville talk about this constant distraction in 1850s America, it’s clear that its not just the modern day technology that keeps us from ever giving our full attention to something, but it’s often the case that the people ordering us expect us to swiftly wrap up our business with one whale to plunder the next profitable goal. Constantly put through this metempsychosis (transmigration of the soul after death, reincarnation basically), going through young life’s old routine again and again, to extract the resources and discard the source.