“‘There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness’—to me, that summarizes much of life,” says Yiyun Li on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I don’t think many people would put those three words together in a sentence—wisdom, woe, and madness—as a sort of trinity. I mean, when I say that passage is a touchstone in my reading, I go back to this line and think about what I read, what I write, and what I experience in life. It’s always about these three words. And you cannot separate them in a very clear way.”

 

This week, in a return of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, Donovan Hohn speaks with novelist and essayist Yiyun Li, author most recently of Things in Nature Merely Grow, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, about “The Try-Works,” chapter 96 of Melville’s novel, in which Ishmael teaches readers how to render whale blubber, falls asleep at the Pequod’s jawbone tiller, and, upon awakening, flies like a “Catskill eagle” into and out of the “blackest gorges” of the soul. The chapter’s closing paragraph is, to Li’s mind, possibly “the most gorgeous paragraph written.”

 

Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,” Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin,” and Philip Hoare on “Monstrous Pictures of Whales.”

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WORKS CITED

(In order of mention.)

 

Yiyun Li. “Moby-Dick by Herman Melville,” A Public Space Together, February 3–April 22, 2022.

 

Yiyun Li. Things in Nature Merely Grow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.

 

Yiyun Li. “Some Have Yoga. I Have Montaigne,” The Atlantic, September 4, 2023.

 

Michel de Montaigne. What Do I Know?: Essential Essays. Translated by David Coward. Introduced by Yiyun Li. London: Pushkin Press Classics, 2025.

 

Herman Melville. Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

 

Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace: The definitive translation newly revised. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Revised, edited, and introduced by Amy Mandelker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

 

Herman Melville. “Chapter 96: The Try-Works.” In Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

 

Donovan Hohn. “Episode 17: Queequeg and Ishmael in Love (with Alexander Chee, Aaron Sachs, and Caleb Crain).” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, Friday, November 7, 2025.

 

Plato. The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro; Apology; Crito; Phaedo. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Edited by Harold Tarrant. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

 

Rebecca West. The Fountain Overflows. Introduced by Andrea Barrett. New York: NYRB Classics, 2002.

 

Donovan Hohn. “Episode 14: Charles Baxter on ‘The Sermon.’” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, Friday, September 26, 2025. 

 

Plato. Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube and revised by C.D.C. Reeve. In Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.

 

Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Margaret Homans. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.