Both Melville and Giono were pantheists, or animists, if that means they intuited a god in every tree and a goddess in every lake. Melville, like Emily Dickinson, was discovered only in the mid-twentieth century; Giono has yet to be fully appreciated in the English-speaking world.

—EDMUND WHITE

MELVILLE

MY FRIEND Lucien Jacques* and I began our French translation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick on November 16, 1936, and finished on December 10, 1939. But long before I embarked on this project, for at least five or six years, Melville’s book was my foreign companion. I took it with me regularly on my hikes across the hills. As soon as I entered those vast, wavelike but motionless solitudes, I’d sit down under a pine and lean against its trunk. All I needed was to pull out this book, which was already flapping in the wind, to sense the manifold life of the seas swell up below and all around me. Countless times I’ve felt the rigging hiss over my head, the earth heave under my feet like the deck of a whaler, and the trunk of the pine groan and sway against my back like a mast heavy with wind-filled sails.

Lifting my eyes from the page, I’ve often thought Moby-Dick was breaching right in front of me, beyond the foam of the olive trees, in the boiling waters of the big oaks. But at twilight, when darkness deepens our inner dimensions, this pursuit of mine, into which Melville drew me, became at once more general and more personal. The imagined spout in the middle of the hills could subside, and the illusory waters receding from my dream could leave the hilltops—where I’d been kept afloat—high and dry.

Even during times of peace (and likewise, in the midst of war), there are tremendous struggles one wages alone. This tumult is silence for everyone else. You no longer need earthly oceans and commonplace monsters; you have your own private oceans and your own personal monsters. (To the end of time, unspeakable internal mutilations will turn humanity against the gods. And men never seek divine glory unarmed. No matter what anyone says.)

When I was left alone in the dark, I had a clearer understanding of the soul of that patrician hero who takes command of Moby-Dick. He would accompany me on my homeward path. I never had to take more than a few steps to catch up with him and, once the depths of the shadows were black, to become him. I would reach him with what felt like a single, longer stride. Then it was as though I’d entered inside his skin, my body clothed in his like an overcoat. With his heart in place of my own, I would troll my wounds through the wake churned by a huge creature of the depths.

Man always craves some monstrous object. And his life has no meaning unless he devotes himself entirely to its pursuit. Often, he needs no fanfare of any kind. He appears to be tucked away, quietly cultivating his garden; but, inwardly, he cast off long ago on the perilous voyage of his dreams. No one knows he’s gone. For that matter, he looks like he’s still here. But he’s far away; he haunts forbidden seas. That gaze of his—the one you caught a moment ago, the one that plainly couldn’t serve any earthly purpose and passed through material things without pausing—he was gazing that way because he’d just clambered down from a crow’s nest. He’s the kind of man who was born to survey uncommon spaces. Such is the secret of lives whose contours can sometimes appear familiar; often, the secret of our own. Sometimes the rest of us know nothing about it until the very end: the awful whiteness of an inexplicable shipwreck that suddenly garlands the sky with spray and foam. But—and this is true in the majority of cases—all of this takes place over such vast reaches, and with monsters so enormous, that it leaves no trace, no survivors, “and the great shroud of the sea rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”