Herman Melville

Fire takes five of his ten planets, with two apiece in air and water and a single one in earth, and six of the ten are mutable. Five of the ten were retrograde at his birth. The record says Moby-Dick sold badly, that Melville spent nineteen years as a customs inspector in New York, and that the book was rediscovered thirty years after he died.

Both lights are certain and they sit in easy contact at just over a degree: the Sun at nine degrees of Leo, where identity is unusually solid and unusually visible, and the Moon at ten of Sagittarius, needing room and quick to move past a bad mood. The reading is that what is wanted and what is needed agree, an unforced sense of self. The Sun also sits sixty degrees from Mars at just under a degree, effort coming easily and in one's own interest. In a record of nineteen years in a customs house after one unread book, those two easy contacts make for a quiet and uncomfortable kind of irony, and the chart offers no account of the gap.

The Moon, Uranus and Neptune fill seventeen degrees of Sagittarius, the sign that measures a thing by how far it got from where it started. Jupiter sits in mild friction with Pluto at a third of a degree, ambition and force colliding. Venus lies at an awkward angle to Uranus at three quarters, closeness and freedom colliding. Mercury sits in mild friction with Venus at under nine tenths. A novelist whose record is one unread book and nineteen years of inspecting cargo had the sign of distance holding three planets, which is either a joke or the point.

He died in New York on 28 September 1891, at seventy two, and both of his lights were touched twice over that day. Pluto sat sixty degrees from his natal Sun at a quarter of a degree and directly opposite his natal Moon at three quarters, while Neptune sat at that same sixty degrees from the Sun at under half a degree and opposite the Moon at just over half. The Moon was at its last quarter and sixteen per cent lit, which is the phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details, which for a book rediscovered thirty years afterwards is the phase the record would have picked.