". . . though of real knowledge there be little, of blog posts there be a plenty . . . "
Once upon a time, a blogger strayed into waters he shouldn't have . . .
(Image originally found here)
This was going to be a silly little post about Melvil (born "Melville") Dewey and the fact that he was born on December 10, 1851, one month after the American publication of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. I was going to make a little hay of what I'd hope would be an entertaining if not humorous sort, imagining that his father, enamored of the writer if not of Moby-Dick, pre-destined his son to peruse Chapter 32 ("Cetology"), there note that Ishmael has categorized whales by size, just as books once were in many libraries, and set him on the course to devise the book-cataloguing system that now bears his name.
(For the record, I can't determine whether Dewey was named for the writer--all the more reason to make up something, right?)
But then I read this:From childhood, Dewey was fascinated with books. In 1868, when his school caught fire, he rescued as many books as he could from the school library; but inhaled a great deal of smoke in the process and consequently had a cough that lasted for months. Told by his doctor that he would be dead within a year or so, he tried to make the most of what he thought would be limited time, according to the recent and fascinating biography by Wayne Wiegand. (emphasis mine)(from here)
Compare to the opening lines of Melville's novel:"Etymology"
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)
"Consumption," for those who may not know, is an old term for lung-wasting diseases such as tuberculosis, often marked by heavy coughing.
I don't know why learning this suddenly took the humor out of this little post for me, why Melvil Dewey suddenly, in my mind, took on more of Ishmael's doomed nature than I had anticipated. But he is also, curiously, Ishmael's social opposite: the Straight Dope site linked to above notes, "We feel obliged to note that Dewey was no saint. He was racist, antisemitic, anti-black, anti- everything not white male Anglo-Saxon Christian." Anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows this doesn't at all describe Ishmael, at least as regards his friendship with Queequeg.
Did Ishmael's novel-length meditation on The White Whale--and Ahab's obsession with him--become for Dewey the quest for an efficient way of organizing and cataloguing knowledge stored in books? So far as I can determine, no. But I do wonder, now, whether Melvil read Melville and in some way, shape or form saw looming out of those pages some inkling, some version of the life ahead of him . . . or, perhaps, the life he found himself in the midst of living out.
UPDATE: The curious may enjoy looking at this map of the voyage of the Pequod. Click on the image to enlarge and move about. Gorgeous in its mid-19th-century feel and in its attention to detail.
