This past weekend a hundred-plus people in Provincetown did something odd: they interrupted their weekends to go to the library and each read aloud a ten-minute selection from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Now, understand: we’re lightweights in the Moby-Dick Marathon, as it’s called. In New Bedford, they’re hardcore: they power on straight through, so volunteers can find themselves reading at three o’clock in the morning. (I know, right? Either Moby-Dick or the middle of the night, but seriously—both?) In Provincetown, we take time off for supper and sleep, and so it lasts for three days. I’ve been a volunteer reader every year we’ve done it, and have been very fortunate in that at no time did my allotted portion contain any of the truly tedious passages, like the chapter we might refer to as “Everything You Wanted To Know about Blubber But Were Afraid To Ask,” or  the one in which Ishmael notes that, although dozens of scholars greater than he is have attempted to depict or understand whales, none have managed to do so comprehensively, and then declares he's going to try anyway.

Whew!

It’s a strange thing, this Melville obsession. Sure, New Bedford and Provincetown used to be tremendous whaling capitals, but there are other ways of underlining that history besides reading what has got to be one of literature’s most patently tedious books. One man I know has a passage from Moby-Dick covering an entire wall in his home. Others quote parts of the book by memory, or carry Moby-Dick tote bags, or keep the volume in pride of place in their libraries. And one must ask—especially if one happens to be me—what the dickens?

I expect that at the end of the day it’s possible to parse through Melville’s turgid prose and arrive at the core of the story: a man’s obsession with something just this side of unattainable that may yet kill him. I’ve read analyses that reckon Ahab and Moby live in everyone’s souls, in the places where we aspire to be more, to be challenged, to reach further and harder and give our lives over to this quest, whether it be for love, for meaning… or for a whale.

I get that; I may not have studied Melville in school (I went to school in France, where we were often offered equally repellent classics penned by French authors), but I’ve at least skimmed all of the book by now, and even read large swaths of it, and I do understand the undercurrent of courage and hope that Herman’s style doesn’t manage to altogether drown in sentences without discernible end.

But to me that has little to do with the Moby-Dick Marathon. I sit there in a room that’s cohabited by a half-scale model of a fishing schooner (yeah, we have a ship in our library) and listen to friends and neighbors bravely attacking their allotted pages, stumbling over antique expressions (and frank neologisms), coming up for air and plunging back in, and the truth is, it’s all great fun. This is a community living on the edge in so many ways, and having a common focus (at least for these three days) on something bigger than our problems is a good thing. And while most of us denounce the ignorance and cruelty and greed that once led humans to nearly eradicate whales from the planet, it’s where we were at one time, just as humanity has done other things that make us cringe today—“owning” other human beings, colonizing less affluent countries, overthrowing governments, starting wars.

I look at my own history and know full well that I have, with some dismal frequency, behaved badly: made rotten choices, harmed others. I hope I’m better than that, now; I try every day to be better than that—but it’s never not going to be part of who I am. In a sense, we’re all recovering whalers, trying to be better; and if nothing else, these marathon readings can remind us of that.

Call me Ishmael.