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In August, I went to CA for the first time and had the pleasure of visiting the Sequoias in Sequoia National Park—they are the oldest and largest living things on Earth. In two senses, then, they win the evolution game: nothing is bigger, and nothing outlives them. If the goal, though, of evolution is to proliferate your species, then they have nothing on mosquitoes or rats; they only grow at a very specific elevation in two places on Earth. And if they goal of evolution is to be able to defend yourself, run fast, be sentient, etc., then they also lose.

Yesterday I was able to add to this thought that I had during the summer. Sequoias (as living things) are part of an emergence story. The “point” of emergence stories is not for everything to be reaching for the same goal. The narrative of an emergence story is that everything is constantly reaching for what will (or might possibly be) more useful in its particular situation. If evolution were a narrative foundational story, maybe life would have a single goal, and would always be attempting to create the biggest, longest-living, strongest, fastest, smartest, etc. creature—but that would be a strange living thing, indeed.

To somewhat relate these thoughts to Moby-Dick, I was wondering what the book would look like if it were mapped out like the images Prof. Grobstein gave us to represent the four stories. I think it would be most like the emergence story, with periods of order (when the plot takes over) and then more spread-out sections, when the chapters don’t directly relate to each other, or at least don’t clearly progress from one to the other. These tangents (Ch. 80, “The Nut,” for example) are not useless—they are reaching for new possibilities and opening up new paths for inquiry. I think this book is so long in part because Melville wanted to include everything he could come up with that might be useful to some reader in understanding the book and how it relates to their own life. It’s for us to piece together, not to understand the book “as a whole” (he never wants to finish anything), but to connect with our own experiences; this is how he’s suggesting that we read.