One With Nature

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John R. Gillis in The Blue Humanities says, “It was when nations turned away from the sea as a place of work that writers and painters turned their full attention to the sea itself.” Ironically, the catalyst in how we perceive the ocean transpired the very moment society deemed the ocean monotonous. The article examines how the sea had been viewed primarily through a utilitarian lens: “The focus was almost entirely on the ships and the skills of the men who manned them” In this distancing, artists, writers, and thinkers found space to reinterpret the ocean. When the sea was no longer “useful” in the traditional sense, it became meaningful in new ways. Gillis later includes another line that made a strong impression on me: “The awesome power of the sea, as witnessed from the safety of land, was a powerful and mental stimulant.” Confronting something grand and dangerous, but at a safe remove, incites a canvas for imagination. It triggers thoughts about the limits of human control and the vastness of the unknown. This mirrors romantic tradition where nature plays a big role in the narrative.

By the time I reached the end of Gillis’ essay, I began to reflect on my own connection to nature. The phrase “touch grass” comes to mind, this phrase is commonly used to remind someone that a natural world exists and clarity can be found by simply going outside to touch some grass. Nature has always been therapeutic, I tried to think of the last time I actually felt one with nature. Park visits, beach trips and even hikes have subtle reminders of urbanization. The article reminded me how much of a privilege it is to truly immerse yourself in nature and allow your thoughts to run freely. 

Fish sticks? Moby Dick is gay whale

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While reading “What Moby Dick Means to Me,” I started asking the same question. For some reason or another, millions of people around the world have heard the title of Moby Dick, and most claim, Oh yeah, I know what that’s about. Even my 8-year-old niece has heard about Moby Dick, but why? Why is this novel a pop culture icon and a household name in literature, yet most people have yet to read it?


“American high-school students are subjected to Melville’s madness, with its subversion and, to modern eyes, overtly homoerotic passages.” (Hoare) What Hoare is stating is absolutely true; Moby Dick is often considered a high school read, where teens are forced to read an 800-page book that, in my opinion, is more suited for college-level readers. I mean, I’m currently enrolled in a class dedicated to the many layers and facets of this iconic novel. Moreover, through research, Moby Dick has been published in hundreds of versions, providing readers of all knowledge levels with access to what appears to be a simple story of adventure. So why are we wasting our time when, on the surface level (pun intended). I’m eager to know more and why.


Speaking of high school, Moby Dick often was a gay joke in class or would release a few immature snickers when it would be said in class by the teacher. That is also a possibility, which explains why the title is well known, but the heart of Moby Dick remains. Not only did the Bible make Jonah and the Whale a staple in religious stories, but also the first animated version of Pinocchio made an incredible impact on the lives of children around the world. It was released in the 1940s and remains referenced to this day. I believe this has had a profound impact on the legacy of Moby Dick in American history, as it’s deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness from childhood onward; familiarity is quite comforting.


“Overly homoerotic passages.” What can I say, that too caught my eye. Leave it to the gays to make a literary icon gain new relevance as a gay icon. Watch out Babadook! Brendan Fraser plays a gay character in the 2022 film The Whale, where he plays an ailing English professor struggling in his relationship with his teenage daughter, but is restored through an essay she wrote on Moby Dick. In the finale (spoiler alert), Brendan Fraser reads the essay aloud to his angsty daughter right before they both smile at each other, and he dies, floating away into an imaginary white light crossing over the sea. Moby Dick… the icon that you are! Slay momma


Philip Hoare even states’ Moby-Dick’ is a long book, and time is short. Even a sentence, a mere phrase, will do.” This is what keeps the legacy alive. No matter how you interpret it, there is no wrong answer, and there’s something to find inside the Whale that is missing in us all. There is no answer to life, but from the sound of things, Moby Dick may have some answers to keep the world turning. I’ll be sure to revisit this post come December and see if I have an answer to some of life’s questions (homoerotic or not) with the help of Herman Melville.


“No, my first name ain’t Whale. It’s Moby… Mr Dick, if you’re nasty!”

Man’s Obsessiveness with Nature in ‘What Moby Dick Means to Me’

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What caught my eye in this article by Hoare, were the two novels compared to Moby Dick: Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights.

He says: “…the former (Wuthering Heights) in its own witness to one man’s obsessive interference with nature, was a direct influence on Melville…)

I agree with Hoare’s choices on novels here. It is true that Shelley and Brontë introduce us to worlds where man’s unrelenting obsession with the natural world can both serve as a tool to further understand the “sublime” or for worse, to arrive at the merciless wilderness where only the strong survive. In short, nature contains the potentialities for savagery but also grace. I also think it is interesting that all three novels were conceived at a time period between “the primeval old and and the impossibly new, between an abiding sense of certitude and the dissembling future.”

I found a compelling passage from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:

…For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain“

This points to the pessimistic view of the world that Victorians had as they tried to understand the natural world but arrived at a strong notion of uncertainty, closely tied to the understandings of faith and nature.

Returning to Our Beginnings – John Gillis’s article “The Blue Humanities”

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In his 2013 essay The Blue Humanities, John Gillis writes about the seemingly profound connection between modern Western culture and the sea. He writes, “The sea lurks in the imaginations of millions, if not billions, of people who will never test its waters. It is forever in our dreams and nightmares…” This line resonates with me on many levels. It broadly captures a paradox that speaks deeply: as our direct interaction with the sea becomes rarer, fewer people make their living from it; it gains a symbolic presence instead. For me, this mirrors how we often romanticize or maybe mythologize experiences that we have grown disconnected from.

I think that Gillis’s observations throughout his article perfectly capture the transition many of us have made: the more removed we become from it, the more the sea inhabits our dreams, our art, and our sense of wonder and curiosity. There’s also a psychological aspect to this: the more we lose direct contact with something, the more room there is for our imagination to fill in. The sea becomes less a physical place and more a canvas for freedom, or danger, depth, and mystery. Gillis points out that for much of Western history, writers and artists hardly looked at the water at all. Instead, it was just the gap between coasts. A space one had to cross in order to reach land. Artists painted the boats or animals within the waters, but not the waters themselves. Only when people no longer had to live on or by the ocean daily did it seem to become visible in new ways.

Another passage that struck me comes when Gillis writes: “Pristine nature, now in short supply in industrialized heartlands, found refuge in the oceans, while the mystery once associated with terra incognita relocated to the deeps. Simultaneously, the sublime, previously associated with mountains and forests, came to be associated with wild water.” This moment helped me to see how cultural ideas about beauty, wilderness, and awe are not fixed; they actually do shift as our environments change. Once people had cut down forests, climbed mountains, and mapped the land, the mystery they so desperately wanted was no longer available, so it had to be sought elsewhere: the sea.

I find this meaningful because it speaks to the way humans seem to always be searching for spaces that remind us of our smallness. I have the same feeling when standing next to the ocean—that feeling of insignificance but amazement. Gillis’s point helped me see that the sea is not just a physical reality but also a vessel for what we may have lost on land. The need for untouched beauty and mystery seems to stay with the ocean.

What is the ocean?

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Reading Gills’ article was mostly me reacting “oh right,” “that’s true,” “that’s fair,” “interesting, I share the same sentiments.” I was more in awe about the evolution of sea exploration than the studies themselves, how it went from “how to survive at sea” to “let’s explore more of the unknown.” It’s as if navigating the seas were just as treacherous as learning how to drive. But what fascinated me more is that writers and painters turned the ocean “into a place of spiritual and physical recreation… In an era when everything seemed to be in a state of becoming, (the ocean) represented the flow of life in ways that the land could not.” To me this means that the ocean became a literary device. For example, the ocean in Moana guides and lifts her spirits in her journey to Maui and Te Fiti. Metaphorically, in the Life of Pi, it both helps and threatens Pi with waves and storms. Then there’s a tiger, but even he is afraid of the water’s mysteries. Moana and Life of Pi are both works depicting the ocean playing different roles. It’s become a crucial literary device with cultural and symbolic significance.

This article is an eye-opening for Moby-Dick.

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After reading What ‘Moby Dick’ Means to Me, written by Philip Hoare, I discovered a lot of interesting points that needed to be addressed in this blog. The first point I want to make is how the writer mentioned Moby-Dick is not just a book, but rather how one interprets the text. Hoare wrote: “I didn’t know then what I do now: that “Moby-Dick” can be whatever you want it to be. It took me thirty years to discover what the book was—or what it was not.”. When I read this particular quote, it makes me ponder the possibilities of the book being more than just texts, and you have to pay really close attention to how these phrases create meanings. And when I first read this quote, I thought to myself: “Thirty years is probably a little bit of exaggeration”, but then it hit me, with a book being that size, thirty years is needed to be able to explore the possibilities of the meanings inside this book. The careful consideration and dedication were probably put into dissecting the true meaning of these texts. Another interesting question that caught my attention is when Hoare asks: “Could Melville have ever imagined that his book would travel so far, and find such unlikely readers?”. My answer to this question is probably not. The reason why I think of it this way is because I have learned that Melville was quite depressed during his time of writing because Moby-Dick was not the reader’s favorite as he thought it would be, and that hit him hard. My guess is that Meville accepts the idea of a book not being famous, but it is still one of his signature marks that he left behind for future generations. He accomplished finishing a book, and I believe he went out knowing that his work is still there even if he is gone for a long time. It will find its way to the readers, and even if it is not, then at least he wrote something that he himself believes he could write. I haven’t read the book yet, but after reading these articles for the past couple of weeks, I have to say that I am eager to read Moby Dick, and I am very excited to listen to our discussions about the book. 

The Modern West: The Vast Sea

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I have always viewed the ocean with such hesitancy, afraid of what the water might contain—but why exactly is that?  That humans as a collective, have such a compelling fear towards this part of our world?

Perhaps because the ocean acts much like a beast as it roars recklessly—too close for comfort. Unlike the stars which are only a glimpse into the heavens, untouching in nature, unless we reach out to it, the ocean is willing and wanting to drag you into the depths of its underworld. 

However, despite this fear, I have an unrelenting urge to understand its dark beauty as a reflection of my own. I’ve learned now that the fear that I’ve come to associate the ocean with is imaginative at most, a product of projected emotions towards something I can’t fully comprehend, so my own mind chooses to fill in the gaps. 

“The human mind delights in grand visions of supernatural beings. And the sea is their very best medium, the only environment in which such giants . . . can be produced and developed.” (Jules Verne). 

This monstrous scale of how big the ocean is, is quite terrifying. However, looking at the ocean from the lens of modern western culture, we can draw similarities to these collective feelings, that help us explain why we feel this way while simultaneously learning more about the ocean and ourselves.  

The Western Front was initially characterized as dangerous, unfit for civilized life, and full of the unknown both good and bad–much like how people view the ocean. It wasn’t until man took that step into the wild that he was able to see the enriching qualities of what the land had to offer in terms of what we can extract from it and what we can extract from within ourselves by understanding the nature around us. 

However, that’s not to say that we don’t have our own monsters inside us that the water reflects quite clearly back at us. Monsters that drive us to pursue and kill wonderful creatures to exchange for profit. Much like the west, the ocean is a wilderness of its own right—having been subjected to the same cruelties of the effects of industrialization.

 Shifting the view of thinking about the land by understanding it as a part of us, humanizes it, and propels us away from that fear of the unknown.

No, I Am Not Paying $1 And Risk Forgetting to Cancel

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As the title said, I’m not putting my information on a newspaper website just to gain access to content I can get in 30 other articles for free. But because I have to read this particular one, I had to do a super pro gamer move called “quick-scan” where the further I have to scroll down, the more I gamble if the next screenshot I take is after the next paragraph, something new, or if I’ve been screenshotting the same paragraph for the past 20 attempts!!!! I found this was efficient as the website would always block my access after 2 seconds or less of reading.

For the little I was able to read, it looked like Hoare grew a sort of appreciation for the book. After comparing it to Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, he mentioned it was as if “it reads like something that was written before books were invented, yet it is utterly modern—pre–postmodern perhaps. It is part of its own prediction, as if it and its characters had been there all along, and had only been waiting to be written.” I found this particularly enticing: it’s a notoriously boring book on-par with two of the most known novels, written like a timeless artifact. Based on the latter sentence, it seemed the book was written with a mix of outlining and pantsing, which makes it an “experimental” narrative, as Melville possibly wrote with not much direction and clear direction simultaneously.

What Moby Dick Means To Me – W3

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Hoare really makes a case to proving that Moby Dick is a hotshot of a book. I can immediately tell how passionate he is about it with every single word he uses to describe it. Simply calling it “good” seems a bit too simple, but I can’t necessarily judge it until I’ve obviously read it. His opening line is what really helped me form my initial opinion. “For years, ‘Moby-Dick’ defeated me.” I can already imagine not only the length of the book, but the boredom to get to me quickly in the midst of reading about a mutiny, a whale, and a dude named Ishmael. Even so, I think the way he puts Moby Dick on such a high horse pedestal sounds a little too far? Sure, a book can be life changing to this extent, but can I really expect this about Moby Dick?

Hoare mentions how “It’s barely a book at all. It’s more an act of transference, of ideas and evocations hung around the vast and unknowable shape of the whale…” and honestly, based off of my initial knowledge, I’d have to slightly disagree with that statement. A book is a book, and while a book could be different for someone else, it’s still something that tells a story. A story is already ideas, evocations, and unknowable to anyone but the author and intended audience. There’s no incorrect way to read something, but then again, why is a whale such a center part in the 1800’s? What’s missing other than sitting down and cracking the book open to dive right into the vast ocean? With the way Hoare speaks about it, I’m just sincerely hoping that the book really does knock my socks off. I’d kind of hate to be disappointed after being hyped up after reading his article. I hadn’t necessarily though about the book’s impact on others either, it just goes to show how lots of different pieces of literature stand the test of time.

“What Moby Dick Means To Me” week three response

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To my mind, there are only two other works with which it bears comparison: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818), and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” (1847). The former, in its own witness to one man’s obsessive interference with nature, was a direct influence on Melville, who acquired a copy on a visit to London in 1849, even as the whalish shades were beginning to swirl about in his imagination.

I want to talk about the section of the article, I talked about this in the last class with my group but this idea of studying nature and going to nature to heal isn’t a new idea, it’s just new to Americans. Melville’s response to the “American Scholar” is so funny to me but this idea of going into nature and finding yourself and going into nature to heal from something is not a new idea, the romantics have been teaching us the ways of going into nature and applying it to your pen.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelly is my all time favorite book and I honestly a huge inspiration to Moby Dick, a monster in the nature, going to hunt down the monster, and then learning during the journey. The monster will always be a reflection of some sorts. So as we learn about why Moby Dick was written, I have thought this the whole time so far of thinking how similar it was to Frankenstein and the romantic period. reading this, in the article was everything to me and made me feel validated.