May 22, 2020 | By Hannah Loomis

Where are you from? 

I’m from Kailua, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu.

What is the title of your essay? 

The title of my essay is “A Mortally Intolerable Truth: Living with the Infinite in Melville’s Moby Dick.”

What was the essence of your argument?

I start by examining a universal desire for the sea that we all share. My argument is that this desire is the longing of the soul to gain freedom from the confines of the body. I set up pairs of opposites that all correspond to one another: land and sea, body and soul, finite and infinite, and distinct identity and undifferentiatedness. Our desire to get as close to the sea as we can is the voice of the part of us that wants to spread wide and mix continuously with the world around us. However, the problem—the mortally intolerable part of this, —is that we are forever fated to be both body and soul. The body tells us to nourish our individual identities in the safety of land. The soul urges braving the cold chaos of ocean living in favor of granting the soul the freedom to roam and stretch towards the infinite. No matter where we are—land or sea—we end up discontented, feeling contradicting desires that pull against one another.

How did your essay connect to the different aspects of the Program throughout your four years?

I came to this topic in junior year, during a Montaigne preceptorial. We were tasked with writing a Montaigne-style essay of our own, on whatever topic we wanted. I wrote on the fact that I wanted to be in nature all the time and didn’t know why. During the summer I read Moby Dick and found many similarities between my own experiences and Melville’s description of the universal desire for the sea. Later in senior year I read Kierkegaard, and found language of human beings containing both the finite and the infinite that helped expand my understanding of the themes in Moby Dick.

What was the writing process like?

The writing process was a difficult one. Moby Dick is long, has no apparent structure, and resists interpretation. I had to spend all of winter break and half of writing period rereading the book and organizing my ideas, and I then wrote most of the paper in the last week and a half. My poor advisor was still reading the last pieces of my conclusion hours before the deadline.

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned during your time at St. John’s?

Before I came to St. John’s, I don’t think I had any opinions of my own. I struggled freshman year with receiving every reading with the same weight, and not knowing how to truly evaluate them. This school has taught me how to identify my instincts about the readings we do, and further, to trust and develop them. I have gotten to know myself and my mind in a way that I doubt I would have at any other school.