A Whale Ship Was My Yale College and My Harvard

How should we live in the world, both with each other and with everything in the natural world around us? It’s a big question and Herman Melville wrote a big book about it, Moby-Dick (1851), from which this seminar takes its title and its focus. The novel tells a tale of humans who go to sea in a wooden ship, sailing to the literal ends of the earth in the deadly pursuit of whales, source of wealth but also vital beings in their own right. It’s a story with serious consequences, especially when read in our time of environmental and climate emergency, the whale-ship in which we now all sail, at Harvard and beyond. But because Moby-Dick also makes the natural world beautiful and the connections among humans hopeful (even under cruel conditions), it gives us an especially powerful prism to consider today’s most pressing problems.