From the margins

I had spent my senior year at Wellesley on "Moby-Dick," committing some of it to memory and wallowing in pessimistic transcendentalism. In the years since, I've reread it maybe more often than any other living American (or so I like to think), and I still have my ancient Modern Library edition, with its cryptic penciled marginalia:

"His double vision parallels the whale's," "Wham! ambiguities -- irony -- inscrutability" and (oh, dear), "Is welcoming death the most intense form of living?"

—Sara Lippincott, L.A. Times