You can’t call me Ishmael. But by God, have I too suffered the consequences of an obsession with a great white whale? Yes. Yes, I have.
At regular intervals in my life, I have tried to read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Really tried. I have approached it in good faith, full of optimism and snacks. I have approached it like a wrestler, ready to body slam it into submission. But no. Somewhere between the annoying whale and the even more annoying Captain Ahab, I lose my will to live.
I have approached it in good faith, full of optimism and snacks. I have approached it like a wrestler, ready to body slam it into submission.
Don’t worry. I have repeatedly been informed of the greatness of the novel. Dear friends testify to its many merits. I have been shamed into trying again. Several times. I have. And I will again. But not now.
At some point, my ridiculous determination to finish a book about a man destroying himself through his own ridiculous determination to catch a whale began to feel a little bit too much on the nose. I had to take an extended break while I was still one leg ahead of Captain Ahab.
A while back, I did some basic arithmetic. It established one crucial fact: you can’t read everything. Getting through the British Museum’s cuneiform collection alone, one tablet a day, would take about 350 years. Imagine trying to catch up on everything humanity has ever written. Well, this is where my arithmetic breaks down. But I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the sun turned into a red giant and incinerated both Earth and your ridiculously high cultural ambitions before you caught up.
The RIGHT things
So, it’s impossible to read everything, let alone make your way through all of humanity’s creative endeavours. But how, then, do you choose? I suspect it means finding the RIGHT things. Whatever those are.
You never really have to wonder for long. There are curricula, canons and know-it-alls everywhere ready to tell you what’s right, whether you want them to or not. According to them, I’m pretty sure Moby-Dick is the RIGHT thing.
But is it right for me? Right now?
I know I sound a bit flippant here. It’s intentional. But before I move on, I have to admit that all those approved lists and the people who swear by them are not necessarily wrong. There are works of art that have tickled the fancy of generations of people, and we shouldn’t assume they were all idiots. Some of these works will probably continue to delight, infuriate and astonish people for centuries to come. That matters.
But there are far too many works like that to fit nicely onto tightly curated—and at times biased—lists. They are way too unruly to sit still in the classroom, and far too many to squeeze into one approved version of being cultured.
Considering how many works of art humans have created throughout history, there must be a ridiculous number of combinations that add up to cultured. We each have to find our own.
I suspect some works have acquired so much gravitational pull that they’ll find their way into a great many of those combinations anyway. They hardly need help getting there. And other people’s cultural expectations? That’s one Baby I’m perfectly happy to put in the corner.
It’s complicated
And your particular combination is never fixed. Timing matters. A book that left you cold in your teens can knock you sideways in your forties. (Hello, Frankenstein!) A film that was unbearably slow in your busy twenties can sit just right in your fifties. (Hello, 2001: A Space Odyssey!) The work hasn’t changed. You have. Sometimes culture simply arrives before we’re ready for it.
Of course, it can work the other way too. Something that grabbed you at fifteen may do absolutely nothing for you now. (Sorry, The Breakfast Club.) That’s the very real risk of revisiting an old love. But that’s a topic for a later newsletter.
Trust the tug
Now that all sounds a bit shifty. If the RIGHT thing isn’t necessarily the thing someone else has put on a list, and you can’t even trust your own judgement, how the hell are we supposed to choose?
Trust your gut. Follow your curiosity. What, to borrow a phrase from a different kind of decluttering, sparks joy? Do you feel a connection? Then stay with it.
Joy is not the same as the path of least resistance. Often it is quite the opposite. But curiosity contains a joy of its own. If the connection is there, that curiosity can drag you through hell and still leave you glad you went.
Leopold Bloom got through Ulysses in a day. It took me considerably longer, but I enjoyed our time together. And I still haven’t forgiven Dancer in the Dark for what it did to me, but I wouldn’t want it unseen.
Joy is not the same as the path of least resistance. Often it is quite the opposite.
Resistance is one thing. It’s okay to struggle. (But not mandatory, mind you!) No spark at all? Now that’s a different beast. Put it away. You don’t have to finish it. Not now.
So far, Moby-Dick and I have had an on-again, off-again thing. Mostly very off. We’ve been seeing other people. That’s okay. But who knows? Maybe things will be different in another ten years. Maybe our stars will align. Let’s just hope I don’t have to lose a leg before Captain Ahab and I finally find some common ground. If that day comes, though, I rather suspect my loyalties will be with the whale.
Once culture stops being an assignment, you don’t have to force a connection anymore. You never have to declare a book, a film, a painting or a piece of music permanently banned from your life. If the connection isn’t there now, simply say: not yet.
Just make sure you mean it.
Still feeling culturally promiscuous?
