Chasing metaphoric whales and loving it:
Q: When did you first encounter Moby Dick?
Dr. Carey: I read it in secondary school. Hated it. Was bored to tears. I wrote it off as one of these pretentious things that teachers like and that students hate.
Then I read Moby Dick a second time with someone who had a passion for it. I can say what many students here say– it changed my life. I saw what I didn’t see the first time when I was a clueless kid. And what I saw was only the beginning of what I came to see. I started to understand how truly profound a book it is. Of course I fell in love with it. Later I incorporated it in my AP class at Cushing. I’ve easily read it 25 times.
Moby is such a rich symbol. You can never really put your finger on what Moby is. Ahab with his huge ego and hubris cannot accept that he’s been bested by this force, this thing that goes beyond even his power to understand, that incorporates within itself an understanding that he will never have. He wants to fight through the mask and see what’s on the other side. But the irony of that, of course, is that he’s chasing his own tail. What he’s trying to find is within him.
And being the tragic hero that he is, he can’t accept that. It’s a defeat he’s not willing to live with. And so he chooses to die. Is this making any sense?
Q: Not only is it making sense, I feel like I should sign up for your class. What do you think of John Huston’s film of Moby Dick?
Dr. Carey: I show it every year. The students always love it. When Gregory Peck appears on that quarterdeck with that scar – and of course the scar goes from the top of his head all the way down, it’s rumored, to his feet, it shows the fragmentation of his personality, the split in his own ego, in his own psyche, that can’t be healed.
Q: Huston said when he filmed Moby Dick he processed the film to push the contrast so that things would feel darker than they were and lighter than they were.
Dr. Carey: And he got it right, too, because the book works on opposition. Everything has its opposite. You’ve got Queequeg with his tomahawk ready to kill Ishmael when he finds him in his bed. But on the other side of the tomahawk is a peace pipe. And you see contraries like that throughout the novel.
Q: Of all the characters on the Pequod, whom would you choose to be?
Dr. Carey: My hero is Queequeg. He’s Ishmael’s guide. Queequeg comes from out there. He knows a lot of stuff, but he doesn’t know he knows it. But then again he doesn’t have to consciously know he knows it. In the hero journey he becomes as good a guide as you’re going to get. Queequeg’s the one who initiates Ishmael into what Fitzgerald called the sense of wonder.
There’s a rightness to so much in the book. At one point Melville came out of his study and said, “I’m writing a hellfire of a book.” The fact that the book was a dismal failure as a publication - it’s more than sad.
Q: Just like Walden.
Dr. Carey: Yes, like Walden.
Q: Cushing Academy isn’t far from where these authors lived and worked.
Dr. Carey: Yes. Concord was the literary capital of this country through the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s in the 19th century.
I mean, think about it. 1854, Walden. 1850, The Scarlet Letter. 1851, Moby Dick. 1855, Leaves of Grass. And they were all hanging around. And you’ve got Emily scribbling away but unnoticed. The Alcotts and The Transcendental Club. One of the members said Hawthorne tended to sit in the corner and not say anything. Hawthorne was very shy.
So to have all those people, there had to be cross fertilization. There had to be – and Thoreau was there, living in Emerson’s house. And there’s Hawthorne down the street at The Old Manse – what a time! I don’t know if there’s another one to equal it except maybe the Paris of Hemingway’s day.
Q: How did you decide to come to Cushing?
Dr. Carey: I found out about a job up here. Came to Cushing in the spring of 1978. There was a girl, a senior, in the hallway outside the headmaster’s office just hanging around. She introduced herself, sat down with me, told me about the school. Within about fifteen minutes I was completely sold just by virtue of her openness.
And from my very first week in the classroom I knew that this was the right choice. If I can say anything about 27-plus years of teaching, is that it’s better than it was. For me it was immediately obvious that this is what I wanted to do the rest of my life. And I loved the intensity and the closeness with the students and with the faculty. The collegiality, the chances to get to know people beyond what you would normally get to know in a workplace was always available here.
Q: What would you say to a family that is thinking of sending their child to Cushing?
Dr. Carey: Easy question. Do you want your son or daughter cared for, truly cared for? Enroll them in Cushing. That’s the bottom line. Nowhere will that child be given more attention than here. Fairness of treatment, devotion to the kid’s needs. Investment in his or her success. Passionate involvement in the education and the growth of that child. What more would a family want from a school?
Q: I forgot to ask you about the harpoon throwing competition.
Dr. Carey: Yes, you did.
|
