Most of us have only scattershot memories
of events before age 5 and none at all from before age 3. I don’t differ in
this, but I do remember watching the movie Moby
Dick (1956) at the drive-in from the back seat of my parents’ Pontiac. In
the summer of ‘56 I was 3. OK, I remember only a snippet, but I do remember. I
must have liked the movie since I drew a lot of whales in sketch pads in the
next couple of years. One of my first comic books was the Classics Illustrated version of Melville’s novel. Naturally, I had
no sophistication about any of this. I regarded the story as just a monster
tale, akin to the many monster movies popular in the 1950s. (My sympathies were
usually with the monster.) I don’t remember when I first read the actual full-length
novel, but it was sometime before high school. It was the first time I gave
Ahab any serious consideration instead of simply accepting that he was after
the whale. I asked myself (along with “Why is there a whole chapter on chowder?”)
“What is this man’s problem?”
I stumbled on the answer soon afterward
in, of all places, a preface to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. The preface was written by Ray
Bradbury who, as it happens, also wrote the script for the Moby Dick movie. In it he compares and contrasts Ahab and Nemo.
Ahab, he says, rages against mortality itself. He lashes out against a universe
that is not cruel (since cruelty requires caring, albeit of a malevolent kind)
but, worse, totally indifferent to human suffering. He seeks revenge against
the white whale as an embodied symbol of that universe. Melville was assigned to
my class in high school a few years later and my English teacher, a lapsed
monk, rounded out the religious metaphors with Ahab as Antichrist. I at last
understood Ahab’s funk, but still didn’t quite get the relentlessness of his obsession.
“Yeah, life is tragic. Get over it,” I thought. It is, of course, the nature of
obsession that people don’t just get over it. That is what makes it a type of
illness. What brings this to mind is another book entirely that I’ve been
perusing the past couple of days. True crime writer Ann Rule sometimes devotes
an entire book to a single case and sometimes publishes collections of short
accounts. Without Pity is one of the
latter containing accounts of a dozen murders and their aftermaths. In about
half the cases the motive is obsession – not being able to let go. At least
Ahab’s existential angst was about grand cosmic questions (and his target wasn’t
human), but to commit murder because your girl dumps you is not only horrific
but lame. Anyone who hasn’t been shattered at some point by the ending of a
romance either has led a very sheltered existence or has no heart, but refusing
to let go despite those feelings never ends well. Obsessive romantic attachments are
surprising common and are not limited to exes –sometimes they are a total
surprise to the object of affection. A classic case of erotomania (also called de
Clérambault Syndrome) was the Polish princess Catherine Radziwill who stalked
Cecil Rhodes in the 19th century and frequently told people they
were engaged. He wasn’t interested. (Given the lifelong bachelor’s predilection
for the company of good-looking young men, she may have been seriously barking
up the wrong tree for more than one reason.) Nearly all modern celebrities
acquire stalkers of greater or lesser persistence. Most are harmless. They just
want to imagine a relationship that doesn’t exist, but a few are dangerous
enough eventually to end up in an Ann Rule collection. This most often happens
when the stalkers start to view themselves as the victims – victims of
unrequited love – and so lash out. “Get over it” are never pleasant words
to hear. But there are times when we all can benefit from hearing them.
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