I love literature because it inevitably gets you thinking; about life, yourself, humanity, love, and so on. I also love it because the same work can mean entirely different things for two different people, or, on the flip side, help to people realize they had more in common than they thought. In that sense, reading Philip Hoare’s article makes me happy, because it shows his appreciation for this work. Phrases like, “Few books are so filled with neologisms; it’s as if Melville were frustrated by language itself, and strove to burst out of its confines,” prove my point. We don’t actually know if Melville was frustrated by language and thus invented a bunch of words, but the fact that he does is worthy of note. The invention of new words as a result of frustration is a cool concept and it gets me thinking about how language constrains our understanding of the universe. Language shapes the way we think, but it has limits; and even as someone who is bilingual, sometimes not even two languages are enough to express everything I think and feel. Anyway, I’m excited to learn some new words I’ve never seen before through this book, and hopefully they make their way into my vocabulary to help with that feeling of restriction I sometimes find myself experiencing in terms of language.