How BEING a LONER RUINS Your HAPPINESS | Learning from Old King

Perhaps you’ve enjoyed the Romantic classic Moby Dick by author Herman Melville or the frightful novel Frankenstein by author Mary Shelley. The first is about a captain’s determination to exact revenge on the whale that bitten off his leg in the previous voyage. The second is a novel retelling the story of the young scientist Victor Frankenstein who gave his life to the creation of and the subsequent destruction of his semi-successful experiment with bringing a man back to life. For thought the only thing these two have in common is the general time period in which they were written and the specific genre - The Romantics, and many would question that. Other than these two they seem very different stories. One is a novel about a captain, the sea, and a white whale written by an American just before the Civil War (1851). The other was authored by an English teenager Mary Shelley (1818), a tale of horror and possibly the very first science fiction novel ever written. Though I am far from being an expert in such matters, there seems to me to be another area in which these two might share a common theme. What, you ask, could that commonality be? - Obsession. Both of these stories recount how a man destroyed his life through an obsession. Captain Ahab was obsessed with revenge; while Victor Frankenstein was obsessed with fame and achievement. Obsession can take many forms but all of them tend to have the same root cause - envy and lust.