[0] https://www.biblio.com/moby-dick-by-melville-herman/work/550...
loose fish vs fast fish is top of the line 19th century humor.
i admit i was bored to tears by those sections on the first read.
honestly i think it just isn’t a great read for people in their teens/20s as the world weariness, fatalism, and obsession with an imperfect understanding of an obscure expertise is something better appreciated as one ages.
> Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabi...
https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/42/moby-dick/777/chapter-96-the-t...
Sadly many authors don't get the recognition they deserve for generations afterwards... but the important thing is they didn't let that possibility dissuade them from writing!
His obituary in the New York Times is telling (Oct 2 1891) [1] - he was already considered an obscure trivia at the time. (The Sept 29 obituary notice actually misspelt Moby Dick.)
"There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigor of life that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was but of three or four lines. Yet forty years ago the appearance of a new book by Herman Melville was esteemed a literary event, not only throughout his own country, but so far as the English-speaking race extended."
Melville's revival came in 1919, long afterwards.