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Moby-Dick and the Indefinite Sublime: On facing the white page
This essay originated as a Santa Fe Institute Public Lecture in May 2026.
How do you write? I mean, at all: How do you enter or approach that space where literature becomes possible? Is there some kind of protocol or password that, once cracked, grants access to those secreted troves of writerly capacity—some law that, once discerned, unlocks them? I used to imagine so and, in my youth, would flail around like a lost Egyptologist hoping to stumble across it. Despite not having found it, I nonetheless fluked my way into print, whereupon people started to ask me what the secret was. I never knew how to answer—until an acquaintance, the novelist Sheila Heti, passed me an email she’d received from her friend Miranda July, recounting a recent dream. “My dream last night,” July told Heti, “was in the form of an email from you”:
you wrote me about how when you were in your early twenties you and your boyfriend and your best friend spent a summer writing letters to the author tom mccarthy. you were trying to figure out how to be writers and wanted advice from him. eventually he began writing you back. this was the advice he gave: “if you want to write more, buy more paper. if you want to write better, buy better paper. and most importantly, the first sentence of the book should be indented.” then he described how he loved to take a pencil and trace the invisible line from the first letter of the first sentence to the upper left corner of the page. i was thinking how i found that last part sexy and then right then you skyped me (something we did all the time) and said you found that part sexy.
Now when someone—interviewer, student, friend—poses the how-to question, I forward this email to them. The advice I (the July version of me) give(s) seems excellent, and right—but in a way whose logic isn’t visible. Think of the essay that follows as a drawing-to-the-surface of this logic.a day or so after agreeing to give a talk about Moby-Dick to mark that novel’s 175th anniversary, I awoke from a dream of my own, the details of which escape me, but which prompted me, at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., to jot down an outline for my lecture under the heading “The Indefinite Sublime.”
“Look,” I said on Zoom the next day to my friend Sina Najafi, editor of the wonderful Cabinet magazine. “I’ve got Moby-Dick mapped out on a single sheet of paper.
“That’s nothing,” he replied. “I’ve got it on an envelope.”
He held the latter to the camera; it was white and entirely blank. My version turned out to be bullshit, but Sina’s was bang on the money. Moby-Dick, despite being crammed with larger-than-life figures (the manic and hubristic Captain Ahab, scouring the world’s oceans for the beast that’s bitten off his leg; the gentle-giant harpooner Queequeg, who declares himself married to Ishmael, the melancholically philosophical narrator, after they share a bed at the Spouter Inn in the whaling town of New Bedford; the whaling ship Pequod’s conflicted mates Starbuck and Stubb; the multinational, multiracial crew they oversee), is nonetheless a book that’s full of blanks. There are “bitter blanks,” marble cenotaphs marking the empty graves of sailors lost at sea; sails like “blank bladders”; and blank stretches on charts. If (for Ishmael) “wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable,” the sea, too, “will permit no records.” The whales it hides are faceless and their brains “incapable of being adequately charted.” Behind, among, between, above these, his “snow-white wrinkled forehead” and whole body “streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue”—the whiteness that represents “the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors”—Moby Dick himself, from the moment he looms in our narrator’s mind “like a snow hill in the air” to the end point at which his “blank forehead” wipes the Pequod from the map, acts as a giant, roving blind spot, at once the novel’s focal and vanishing point.
Here, with our talk of the unmentionabl