Moby Dick–“The Whiteness of the Whale”

For various reasons–mostly because the book I’ve written on addiction is done and at the publisher so I am allowing myself the time–I finally began reading Moby Dick.  I’m now on Chapter 42  which is entitled “The Whiteness of the Whale.”  Melville wrote this work a decade before the Civil War, and he was completely and totally spot on about color, race, and the power dynamics therein.  He understands human nature so well that psychologists and psychoanalysts could spend as much fruitful time–and probably more–reading Melville as reading anything officially labeled “psychology” . . .