"I'm on a mission here. A collision with immensity awaits: the 2026 Moby-Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Programming, scholarship, and-the event's steadily droning core-a 25-hour cover-to-cover reading of the great book itself. Hundreds of volunteer readers, in five-minute increments, from noon on Saturday to 1 p.m. on Sunday. A test of my fortitude as a listener, of my ability to keep my behind in a seat."
"Into snowy New Bedford, into the Whaling Museum, into the room where they keep the Lagoda, the museum's half-scale model of a whaling bark. A room with a ship in it, in other words. Two stories high (to accommodate the ship's masts) and stuffed, draped, festooned with humanity: sitters, knitters, nesters, kneelers, sprawlers, leaners, drifters like me, stashed in every alcove and stretched along every railing and baseboard."
The narrator drives south from Boston through bleak winter to attend the 2026 Moby-Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The event stages a 25-hour, cover-to-cover reading with hundreds of volunteers taking five-minute turns from noon Saturday to 1 p.m. Sunday. The museum space, centered on a half-scale model of the whaling bark Lagoda, is crowded and intimate, filled with listeners and various sitters. The reading begins punctually with Regie Gibson intoning "Call me ... Ishmael," and the crowd responds with exuberant whoops. The experience tests endurance while offering an intense, communal encounter with Melville's novel.
Read at The Atlantic
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