Every few years, I reread Moby Dick. This was my fifth reading, if not the sixth (excluding the Great Illustrated Classics version I read as a kid, which was fun). Rereading Moby Dick is my way of reorienting my position as an American and a human being in the world.

I decided to listen to an audio recording of the novel this time around. I used The Moby-Dick Big Read, available on Apple’s podcasts app. Each chapter is read by a different actor, most of them from the U.S. or U.K. The impression that I got from listening to the novel—i.e., what I learned about the novel this time around, because I learn something different each time—is that Moby Dick works not as a novel (we all know it's horrible as a novel) but as a series of vignettes, sermons, and essays. Like Finnegan’s Wake or any great poem or play, Moby Dick demands to be read aloud.

Further, we all know that Moby Dick is a book that lacks a plot or characters in any ordinary sense. Consequently, you can more or less read the chapters in any order and lose nothing of the plot/character development. And if you take any single chapter of Moby Dick and read it in isolation, you’ll be struck by how well the chapter works completely on its own. This is especially true of the chapters that, for me, possess a beauty and infallibility that approaches Scripture: “The Pacific,” “Brit,” “The Symphony,” “Loomings,” “The Gilder,” “The Try-Works,” “A Squeeze of the Hand,” “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,” “The Grand Armada,” and “Stubb’s Supper.” Read each of these chapters as an essay unto itself, and you’ll discover a damning retort to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the entire American project, only more gorgeous and darker than anything written by Emerson or any other American. At this late date in the collapse of the American empire, it's time for us all to revisit Moby Dick.