Captain Ahab - Nineteen Years On

...'Tis now precisely nineteen years since last I read Melville's 'Moby Dick', the book I am now once more close to completing.

How do I know so exactly the date, when barely can I recall the events of last week?

It is this. When last I journeyed with Ahab and his crew on the Pequod's last voyage I could not have been a parent, else I would have only remembered this of him that he, so obsessive in his quest for the White Whale, could spurn the desperate plea of the Captain of the 'Rachel' to join in the search for a missing son, lost when their boat encountered that terrible beast.

The risk of his own crew, the terrible daring of his own life, the insistent demand to catch the terrible fate that awaits him - none of this now matters or signifies. Ahab spurned a parent in distress. That is all I know of him and all I need to know.

It is, of course, between then and now - those nineteen years - that I have lived as a parent myself and, as such, would give all and anything to a fellow parent in distress.

There is that bond of being, to which no other can compare. And thus, today, when Gordon Brown speaks of his sorrowful empathy with David Cameron and his family in their loss of their beloved son Ivan, I fully understand the parental empathy that impels his words. He lost his first child. He knows the hurt as no other can.

The Psalmist writes of 'the deep that sings unto deep.' There is no greater profundity than this.