This chapter opens with the last remedy chosen by a man who has grown melancholy, again and again, for five years.
With little money left and nothing on land to hold his interest, he decides to take a ship and look around the world for a while.
Call Me Ishmael
“Call me Ishmael.” (Chapter 1)
He does not give his name. He only asks to be called that. Whether it is his real name is impossible to know, and there is no need to know.
If a person’s past need not be questioned before you can listen to what he means to do now, then a name is enough as it stands.
When the Purse Grows Thin and the Mind Grows Damp
The melancholy he speaks of has a name. He calls it the hypos.
When the purse grows thin, when a rainy November street feels unusually long, when he stops without meaning to outside a coffin warehouse, when he wants to fall in behind a passing funeral. Such a time comes to him.
Most dangerous of all is the urge that rises to knock the hat clean off some stranger passing in the street. When that moment comes, he knows he must get to sea as fast as he can.
Instead of turning a pistol and ball on himself, he chooses a ship. Where Cato threw himself upon his sword, he quietly takes to the ship.
Every Street Leads to Water
He tells first the story of the island called Manhattan. On a Sunday afternoon, the people of this city walk to the very edge of the piers as if by agreement.
Men penned in offices, men standing behind counters, all of them stand there for no reason but to look at water. That every street in the city eventually leads to it does not feel like coincidence.
Here he brings in the story of Narcissus, the boy who drowned reaching for his own face in the water, and writes that that face is the very key to life’s ungraspable phantom.
Not a Passenger but a Hand
This time too he does not board as a passenger who pays his fare. Instead he boards as an ordinary sailor drawing wages.
Pay to ride and seasickness wrecks the body along with the mind. Work with the hands instead, and the muscles loosen along with the hypos, as he has already confirmed on more than one voyage.
If it is a matter of pride, he answers this way. Pride, too, is something people made, and no one’s pride amounts to much before the ocean.
If taking orders feels shameful, remember that nearly everyone on earth lives taking orders from someone, in one form or another.
Today, Choosing a Remedy
When the mind darkens, people reach for their own remedies. Some travel; some throw themselves into physical work.
Ishmael’s remedy is unusual. He signs onto the strangest and most dangerous trade there is: a whaling ship.
Why whaling of all things, he answers directly in the next chapter. For now only one thing is clear. He has already made up his mind, and he is looking into passage to New Bedford.