“As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing.”
—Herman Melville
Oof, Melville. What a nut.
But I know the feeling. In writing, there’s always something elusive. Something left undone. I myself am never completely happy. I especially dislike rewriting. I poke here and there, changing words. Then change them back. That’s how I know I’m done.
And I’m not happy.
If I am ever completely happy, I’ll know something’s wrong. All my writing is dependent on contradiction. On being a detractor. I don’t endorse or join any group. Happy and satisfied doesn’t work.
It didn’t work for gloomy old Melville either. Moby Dick, unreadable as a whole, is in parts one of the greatest novels of all time. He wrestled with our primal selves, and populated his whaler, the Pequod, with a rogue’s gallery of personalities. Avarice. Pride. Fidelity. He could have just used pig, goose, dog. That’s how close to fable it was.
The book would have been simpler that way. Without the terrible complexities. But it was a novel plumbing the soul, and to his dying day Melville felt he hadn’t nailed down what he wanted, despite the epic attempt.
Melville makes me feel a little better about my stuff. Not much, but a little.
Not that I want to join his crowd. Those 19th century American writers were creepy. Always failing, never arriving, they were obsessed with guilt, sex, the spirit (whatever that is) morality, terror, God or lack thereof, and they never quit. You start to think the endeavor was the whole point. The question was the answer.
Come to think of it, in the novel, I don’t think they ever did get that whale.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com