Another Cruise

I was interviewed about Moby-Dick for a podcast the other day (keep an eye out for an episode of The World in Time, from Lapham's Quarterly), which triggered a re-reading. I think this was my sixth time through? I am now the age of Ahab, who, in chapter 132, tells Starbuck that he started whaling as "a boy-harpooneer of eighteen" and has spent "forty years on the pitiless sea." I, too, have reached my implacability-and-fixed-purpose era. (Or would like to have reached it. That third novel would be getting written faster, if I had.)