170 years later and here we are, doing “Moby Dick” again. No complaints. Etymology and extracts. “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—“ thence we take flight. We leave for sake of living. Then the ocean, now the sky, endless annexing of the world, mapping of the space in which we move, anatomy of the external, frameworks we live in and bring into ourselves.

Stories and fragments of the ones who leave: we who have lost something and it is deity. Endless wanderers on earth and will the Son of Man have no place to rest His head? “His fingers combed the void in despair,” and what else is there to do but claw this way and desperately toward the hard truths of the universe? To itch relentlessly at this phantom pain — “‘can you clarify what’s wrong?’” 400 pages of trying. 400 pages projecting toward God, unity. 400 pages looking at the absence and summoning every place, genre, person possible to fill it. 400 pages finding it cannot be filled, cannot yet be filled.

“The fact that we so precisely describe it does not at all mean that we know it.” This the problem in Moby Dick: the blank white God, more a mystery dissected than whole. “The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it.” Impotence and meaning-making. “Nothing is innocent, and nothing is insignificant…” where does that leave us?

Aimless, emasculated men opting in their pretended powerlessness for a hard descent into neo-Nazi ideologies? Let us be grateful this is only science fiction, and not the fundamental basis for 50% of modern podcasts. And, would you believe, many even more marvelous speculations can be found in Philip K. Dick’s “The Simulacra”: commercials as embodied insects that attend you on the freeway, civilizations built within single apartment buildings, psychokinetic piano players with only very mild schizophrenia — say what you will about Dick; the guy has ideas.

The comedic presentation of these ideas was less a surprise this time, compared to my inaugural reading of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” It’s quiet, it’s quick, and then it’s a telekinetic hypochondriac kicking a policeman in the genitals. Wide gamut. Can’t say this landed quite as well as “Androids,” but an interesting little exploration of fate and those who make it, and packed to the brim for such a slender project.