Favorite Passages from Moby Dick

[ZeaLitY]

I've finished reading Moby Dick today, and am in the process of watching the 1956 and 1998 portrayals. I kept track of my favorite passages from the book so I could share them later. Before I do...

Captain Ahab is now my favorite character in all literature. In his insanity, he represents a man who has freed himself from normal existence, pleasurable pastimes, and fear itself in order to directly defy what he perceives to embody fate. Unlike the other people of his age, who crowd in churches, clutch books, and hang on to ideas of divinity and loving gods to reconcile the world's injustices, Ahab sees the stark reality of the world. He has witnessed people succumbing to disease, misfortune, and the murderous intent of other people; he has perceived human frailty in the evil and injustice that plagues the world and his species. And when the white whale dared to take off part of his leg, the savagery of the injury plunged all his desires towards eradicating that terrible evil, so apparently incarnate to him in Moby Dick, which had erupted from the sea to evilly strike him as it had terrorized all humanity. Though he was possessed with this mania to the point of insanity; though he indirectly took his shipmates to their grave because of his wild venture; and though Moby Dick was not really the God of Fate, Ahab's heart was pure and defiant.

This is Ahab's beauty to me. Many people ultimately find their comfort in this world in some spiritual meaning. They attribute death to part of a gentle cycle, or claim the existence of Gods, or struggle to find some philosophical meaning in injustice, so they can claim "everything is as it should be" and go to rest. So that they aren't tormented by acknowledging the injustice and suffering of the world and their own misfortune, they search for some comforting meaning, and close their eyes.

Not Ahab. Never Ahab.

Ahab is unyielding, sentient will. Ahab gazed upon death and claimed, "Unsatisfactory." Ahab looked upon suffering and cast his disapproval. Ahab stared at the sun and the sky, wondering how any God could tolerate a world as cruel as this, with infirmity plaguing both the human body and mind. And Ahab, but a single man already hurt by the world his august mind condemned, observed his own powerlessness, and said, "This cannot do." He found his purpose in defying fate itself by pursuing the agent of evil that had personally attacked him. He cast away his pleasures and safety, always maintaining a perception of the world grounded in its cold, sad reality, and ever consuming himself in the fiery wish to strike back at it. Ahab represents the human desire to end death; to end suffering; to end injustice; to end sadness. Ahab is the scream of an imperfect being eschewing his or her natural state, and coveting perfection. And now, with science, imagination, and inexhaustible will, we shall achieve perfection. This is the illumination of humanity. Ahab, though a tortured, pitiable soul, was a dreamer and a doer. And as dreamers of humanism continue to struggle against ignorance and nature to render that illumination, they shall not forget his tireless spirit.

With perhaps an extra harpoon's strike, or a little more manpower, Ahab could have won. He may have never killed injustice and evil in humanity, but perhaps he would have released himself from insanity's hold, and retained his "thousandfold more potency" to focus on further intense pursuits. At the very least, he would have become the most famous whaler in all history as the killer of Moby Dick, and a boon to all those who would confront some great, mysterious darkness with eyes as lucid and unrelenting as his. He is a beautiful character, and a beautiful person. And if I must ever christen a nautical craft, then ignoring all maritime superstition, I will name it Ahab; his pursuing spirit will be the sea beneath its wings.

Chapter 11

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light is more congenial to our clayey part.

Chapter 12

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Chapter 16

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

Chapter 36

Hark ye yet again- the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations.

Chapter 36

it seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accmulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.

Chapter 37

Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night!
Chapter 37

Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself!
Chapter 37

The path to my fixed purpose is hid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' bed, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!

Chapter 41

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.

Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him.

The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

Chapter 44:

But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

Chapter 47:

I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.

Chapter 48:

But what it wast hat inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his—these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with torando brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.

Chapter 50:

Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whale-boats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.

Chapter 51:

So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together.

Chapter 52:

But taking advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed - "Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to - - "

At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger's flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.

"Swim away from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice, - "Up helm! Keep her off round the world!"

Chapter 64:

Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object.

Chapter 69:

Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log- shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabout: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!

Thus, while in the life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.

Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.

Chapter 70:

It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. "Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"

Chapter 80

If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls, and you would involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say- This man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations, considered along with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to yourself the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception of what the most exalted potency is.

Chapter 87

But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the circus-running sun had raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a whole lake's contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She carries years' water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which, when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks, from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had come; they would only answer- "Well, boys, here's the ark!"

Chapter 100

"Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's," cried Bunger, stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; "this man's blood- bring the thermometer!- it's at the boiling point!- his pulse makes these planks beat!- sir!"- taking a lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab's arm.

"Avast!" roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks- "Man the boat! Which way heading?"

"Good God!" cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put. "What's the matter? He was heading east, I think.- Is your Captain crazy?" whispering Fedallah.

But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to take the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle towards him commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower.

In a moment he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.

Chapter 106

Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both tie ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and softcymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

Chapter 108

Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don't speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!

Chapter 109

"And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak! I'm all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that's a far worse plight than the Pequod's, man. Yet I don't stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this life's howling ale? Starbuck! I'll not have the Burtons hoisted."

Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: "There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.- On deck!"

Chapter 110

Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favor he asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those dark canoes, and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way. He added, that he shuddered at the thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the usual sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the death-devouring sharks. No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and much lee-way adown the dim ages.

Chapter 113

"Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!" deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood. (I baptize you not in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil!)

Chapter 115

"How wondrous familiar is a fool!" muttered Ahab; then aloud, "Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an empty ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward there! Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!"

And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding Bachelor; but the Bachelor's men never heeding their gaze for the lively revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the homewardbound craft, he took from his pocket a small vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby bringing two remote associations together, for that vial was filled with Nantucket soundings.

Chapter 117

"I am immortal then, on land and on sea," cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;- "Immortal on land and on sea!"

Chapter 124

"Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!"

Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.

Chapter 130

As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf.

Chapter 131

"Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming - "Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the white whale most feels his accursed life!"

Chapter 132

"Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty - forty - forty years ago! - ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before - and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul - when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey - more a demon than a man! - aye, aye! what a forty years' fool - fool - old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! - crack my heart! - stave my brain! - mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! - lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!"

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new- mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths - Starbuck!"

But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.

Chapter 133

"Omen? omen? - the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint."

Chapter 134

"Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw - thou know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand - a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders."

Chapter 135

"Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal man!"

"Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"

[Sajainta]

"I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man."

That's probably my favourite quote in the novel.

[GenesisOne]

What I learned from Captain Ahab:

- Passion and monomania can be easily confused
- There is no obsession worth killing yourself over
- The world is cold and sad because we believe that's how we have to perceive it in order to survive
- You can delude yourself into stopping things that cannot actually be stopped
-  Insanity and beauty can be easily confused

How is Ahab beautiful? After his incident with Moby Dick, deadly revenge filled every fiber of his being. He cast aside the needs of the many (I mean his crew) to achieve what he desired.  He's supposed to embody the sad face of reality when even he won't accept the reality that he's outmatched against the whale.  Ultimately, the whale won, at the cost of Ahab's crew (except Ishmael).  At best, he's a tragic hero.

I think you saw his ideals as beautiful, not his personality and all the negative consequences that followed as a result.  No pursuit is worth the death of those most loyal to you, for you only prove that revenge usually has a more injurious than harmonious goal.

How anyone can see beauty in revenge is an enigma in its own right.

[ZeaLitY]

- Passion and monomania can be easily confused

In my explanation of love for Ahab, I clearly noted that his insanity crossed the line.

- There is no obsession worth killing yourself over

What about Jesus? His precious obsession with spirituality was worth killing himself over, and if he hadn't done it, you'd be worshiping something else right now. Or to walk out of joking about religious icons, what about Martin Luther King, so obsessed about civil rights that he openly invited death and was killed for his actions? These are deaths by high ideals.

- The world is cold and sad because we believe that's how we have to perceive it in order to survive

No, that's reality. One has to accept reality in order to change it. I believe in myself, my dreams, and in the capacity for humanity to be great. I have a big damn good time about being in the springtime of youth. But I still accept that this is a world in which rape, murder, and war are the order of the day, and humanity is fragmented along several hateful tribes of class and nation. Something not believing this would be denial. You have to know your enemy to defeat it.

- You can delude yourself into stopping things that cannot actually be stopped

This was a whale. It was just a smart whale. With another ship or some rudimentary firearms, it could have been stopped.

-  Insanity and beauty can be easily confused

All insanity is not necessarily ugly, and all beauty is not necessarily sane. Ahab is a tragic hero, just like some of the addled tragic heroes of Shakespeare. They are still considered beautiful examples of literature. This is part of appreciating the human condition in its totality.

How is Ahab beautiful? After his incident with Moby Dick, deadly revenge filled every fiber of his being. He cast aside the needs of the many (I mean his crew) to achieve what he desired.  He's supposed to embody the sad face of reality when even he won't accept the reality that he's outmatched against the whale.  Ultimately, the whale won, at the cost of Ahab's crew (except Ishmael).  At best, he's a tragic hero.

This is the layman's view of Ahab, ignorant of his real purpose for pursuing the whale. Ahab clearly states that he's not out to kill a dumb beast of the sea, but to kill everything the whale embodies—evil, injustice, and cruel fate.

I think you saw his ideals as beautiful, not his personality and all the negative consequences that followed as a result.  No pursuit is worth the death of those most loyal to you, for you only prove that revenge usually has a more injurious than harmonious goal.

His passion and determination are at the core of his personality, and these things are also remarkable to behold. In a world where most people can't hardly be assed to learn enough about how the world works, let alone the finer points of humanity, let alone enough to have an informed opinion to elect people to political office, let alone enough to take existential responsibility for their own lives—in a world as that, a man who has risen to high ideal and devoted himself to a single purpose with one-thousand times the intensity of the sun does resemble beauty.

I can't even get 5-6 people to consistently help out with the feminism subreddit, which holds incredible potential for organizing feminists and creating a new source of news to inform women's rights activists. There are MANY participants of that Fuck Sexism thread who expressed vitriol at sexism, contributed to discussion, and expressed passion for women's rights and correcting these huge problems. And yet, apparently, the lion's share of them can't muster the will to click a fucking up arrow a couple times a day to ensure good news articles are represented in the subreddit (which is steadily growing at a few subscribers a day—and thus, it's important there aren't anti-female submissions at the top when these new people arrive). I work myself up to passion thanks to a lot of others who exhibit the same, and yet I'm left in the damn dust when the first opportunity to really do something novel and impacting comes along, simply because it requires work. 2-3 minutes of work. And so today, two submissions of mine and one submission by FafniR (and now, one by FaustWolf) were both downvoted to 0, despite holding informative news about AIDs prevention for women and a report about sexual assault on colleges and the rigor rape victims have to go through to get any justice. Way to fight the power, guys. Those who didn't help probably assumed that I was enough to do the job, or really believe at heart that humanity is corrupt or that nothing can be done, and that they're powerless. Well, if you believe that, you are powerless, and will have a hard time getting respect while criticizing injustice and in the same token doing nothing substantive to help humanity.

The right people could use some more passion. There was a piece I read in 11th grade about a famous Southerner intellectual in the US who roused himself to participate in a debate now in then, cutting down opponents with razor wit. But most of the time, this Southerner was just content to bake under the southern sun in his porch chair, rotting away, letting his extreme talents and capacity to effect good change waste away as so many others who die young or never live seriously enough to plant a sprout of meaning in this world.

Inaction is the assassin of idealism.

I could use a hundred men who don't know such a word as impossible.

Ahab gave a damn. He gave a massive damn, and that's encouraging to someone who finds such a hard time finding the right people who give a damn. Not brainless "revolutionaries"; not indignant fundamentalists; not moderate wafflers; real human beings with a curiosity about the universe and their civilization, and an investment in a meaningful life. And Ahab, in his tragic insanity, was at least stabbing his harpoon in the right idealistic direction.

[Lord J Esq]

I can't even get 5-6 people to consistently help out with the feminism subreddit, which holds incredible potential for organizing feminists and creating a new source of news to inform women's rights activists. There are MANY participants of that Fuck Sexism thread who expressed vitriol at sexism, contributed to discussion, and expressed passion for women's rights and correcting these huge problems. And yet, apparently, the lion's share of them can't muster the will to click a fucking up arrow a couple times a day to ensure good news articles are represented in the subreddit (which is steadily growing at a few subscribers a day—and thus, it's important there aren't anti-female submissions at the top when these new people arrive). I work myself up to passion thanks to a lot of others who exhibit the same, and yet I'm left in the damn dust when the first opportunity to really do something novel and impacting comes along, simply because it requires work. 2-3 minutes of work. And so today, two submissions of mine and one submission by FafniR (and now, one by FaustWolf) were both downvoted to 0, despite holding informative news about AIDs prevention for women and a report about sexual assault on colleges and the rigor rape victims have to go through to get any justice. Way to fight the power, guys. Those who didn't help probably assumed that I was enough to do the job, or really believe at heart that humanity is corrupt or that nothing can be done, and that they're powerless. Well, if you believe that, you are powerless, and will have a hard time getting respect while criticizing injustice and in the same token doing nothing substantive to help humanity.

For what it's worth, I clicked those "fucking up arrows" yesterday afternoon, after you had asked me to. (I couldn't reply to your IM because I wasn't at home when you sent it.) I'm willing to go along with your directions on the Reddit matter. I got the impression that the others are, too. I can definitely see where you're trying to go with it, and it makes sense to me.

Personally, though, I don't think it will be an effective method. Never mind that posting on Reddit is not a "substantive" contribution to humanity, or that upvoting or downvoting items is even less so, or that your goal of eventually kowtowing the Men's Rights group is pointless and distracting. The real problem is that you're small potatoes and you're trying to build up your movement in a linear fashion. It'd never work. One vote per article is rubbish. The rules of the game at Reddit are not set up to allow small, passionate movements to succeed.

To make a difference there you would need either to change the rules of the site, or to cultivate a far larger "posse" than you're going to get from the Compendium--even if every person you asked became a fervent devotee. A hundred fired up people could do a lot better for themselves. If I had the resources at my disposal, I would not pursue this strategy. I would try to build a new network, one that is specifically designed to empower the people who ought to prevail rather than those who are most numerous. Or I would devote the resources to an existing network that fits that description, although I am not yet aware of one.

One last note for the public forum: If you're having trouble getting people to follow you, when they are obviously passionate on the subject, ask yourself where you went wrong. Don't easily make enemies out of your allies. I'll send you the rest in an e-mail.

[Mr Bekkler]

I'm gonna have to argue a little bit.

What about Jesus? His precious obsession with spirituality was worth killing himself over, and if he hadn't done it, you'd be worshiping something else right now. Or to walk out of joking about religious icons, what about Martin Luther King, so obsessed about civil rights that he openly invited death and was killed for his actions? These are deaths by high ideals.

Neither of the two you mentioned killed themselves, though. They were murdered by people who disagreed with their ideals during times of change. When it comes down to it, Ahab merely committed himself to killing an animal, and got himself killed in the process. I'd say Ahab is more comparable to a terrorist suicide bomber in that regard.

This was a whale. It was just a smart whale. With another ship or some rudimentary firearms, it could have been stopped.

So it was just a whale?

This is the layman's view of Ahab, ignorant of his real purpose for pursuing the whale. Ahab clearly states that he's not out to kill a dumb beast of the sea, but to kill everything the whale embodies—evil, injustice, and cruel fate.

So it was not just a whale?

I can't even get 5-6 people to consistently help out with the feminism subreddit, which holds incredible potential for organizing feminists and creating a new source of news to inform women's rights activists. There are MANY participants of that Fuck Sexism thread who expressed vitriol at sexism, contributed to discussion, and expressed passion for women's rights and correcting these huge problems. And yet, apparently, the lion's share of them can't muster the will to click a fucking up arrow a couple times a day to ensure good news articles are represented in the subreddit (which is steadily growing at a few subscribers a day—and thus, it's important there aren't anti-female submissions at the top when these new people arrive). I work myself up to passion thanks to a lot of others who exhibit the same, and yet I'm left in the damn dust when the first opportunity to really do something novel and impacting comes along, simply because it requires work. 2-3 minutes of work. And so today, two submissions of mine and one submission by FafniR (and now, one by FaustWolf) were both downvoted to 0, despite holding informative news about AIDs prevention for women and a report about sexual assault on colleges and the rigor rape victims have to go through to get any justice. Way to fight the power, guys. Those who didn't help probably assumed that I was enough to do the job, or really believe at heart that humanity is corrupt or that nothing can be done, and that they're powerless. Well, if you believe that, you are powerless, and will have a hard time getting respect while criticizing injustice and in the same token doing nothing substantive to help humanity.

You can't control people. You can't force anyone to give a damn about anything and you can't make something like internet articles into anything more important than they already are. I've never even seen whatever website you're talking about with the fucking up arrows. But I've read a lot of the Fuck Sexism thread and most of the articles posted there. Reading them doesn't help anyone though. Especially when you're behind the safety of a computer screen. If you want to really help, then become a lawyer or a politician and try to make a change in the outside world, rather than just creating a motley crew of internet well-reads. Also I fail to see how this relates to Ahab other than the obvious fact that you feel you relate with the character, and these internet articles are your whale. The issues in them are comparable (for you) to the issues the whale represented (for Ahab).

The right people could use some more passion. There was a piece I read in 11th grade about a famous Southerner intellectual in the US who roused himself to participate in a debate now in then, cutting down opponents with razor wit. But most of the time, this Southerner was just content to bake under the southern sun in his porch chair, rotting away, letting his extreme talents and capacity to effect good change waste away as so many others who die young or never live seriously enough to plant a sprout of meaning in this world.

What's wrong with being content with life? You yourself said reality is cold and bleak, so who are you to judge someone who finds happiness somewhere in his own little niche?

Ahab gave a damn. He gave a massive damn, and that's encouraging to someone who finds such a hard time finding the right people who give a damn. Not brainless "revolutionaries"; not indignant fundamentalists; not moderate wafflers; real human beings with a curiosity about the universe and their civilization, and an investment in a meaningful life. And Ahab, in his tragic insanity, was at least stabbing his harpoon in the right idealistic direction.

He still got all his men killed and never achieved his goal. Giving a damn wasn't enough to get something done.

[Radical_Dreamer]

A fantastic book! I wish I had had the forethought to write down my favorite passages as I was reading it. I'll throw out this line, as one I liked and recall, but wasn't in your list.

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”

[Sajainta]

I agree with J.

If you want people to help you out, it's best to ask them.  Lambasting a collective group of people in a tangent on a literature thread won't do anything except piss people off.  It comes off as passive-aggressive.  If you're frustrated, that's fine, but insulting people whose help you want isn't conducive at all.

[ZeaLitY]

One last note for the public forum: If you're having trouble getting people to follow you, when they are obviously passionate on the subject, ask yourself where you went wrong. Don't easily make enemies out of your allies. I'll send you the rest in an e-mail.

I had guessed you'd include yourself with the ones I'm accusing, and I had also guessed (correctly) that you had been helping. Either my subtleties aren't obvious enough, or I need to start leaving disclaimers.

Personally, though, I don't think it will be an effective method. Never mind that posting on Reddit is not a "substantive" contribution to humanity, or that upvoting or downvoting items is even less so, or that your goal of eventually kowtowing the Men's Rights group is pointless and distracting. The real problem is that you're small potatoes and you're trying to build up your movement in a linear fashion. It'd never work. One vote per article is rubbish. The rules of the game at Reddit are not set up to allow small, passionate movements to succeed.

I disagree, simply because there are allies in the wings. A handful of new people a day are subscribing to the subreddit, and I've also been personally thanked by four different people for my substantive contributions. It's a problem at the subreddit that fewer people contribute constructively because of the hostile atmosphere. If they're going to get 0 for submitting something useful, why bother? If they're going to get sexist arguments that go unchallenged, why bother, again? We already erased this zero-sum atmosphere:

• The subreddit went from having a handful of 0-rated articles to having none after our contributions;
• The level of articles submitted per day went from 3-4 to 12-15 (assuming steady contributions from us);
• We buried trollish comments that otherwise would have gone unburied.

The subreddit serves a function. I follow the atheism subreddit to stay abreast of irreligious developments, and it works well; there isn't a single more effective aggregator. Even PZ Myers, one of the most prolific atheist bloggers, only posts 4-5 items of news and interest a day on his blog. The atheism subreddit posts probably close to a hundred, which inform a wide readership and allows for sharpening of arguments. We are not going to somehow magnetically force it to the top in a matter of weeks, but it will arrive to a better point with a few months of effort. Other contributions will arithmetically increase as the subreddit gains more subscribers. It will, even in a state much smaller than the atheism subreddit (which has 66,000 subscribers), become a beautiful little nexus of news and commentary. The apparent paucity of feminist news-aggregating sites that we've observed while trying to find sources for contributions has illustrated the need better than I could have. This would have never, ever gained steam with earth salted by downvoting, but the downvoting was small enough that our little group was sufficient to cancel it out and restore a friendly, fertile environment.

You should know I don't plunge headlong into something I don't completely believe is a good use of my time. My life lately feels like a discretionary curtailing of activities, not exploration of possibilities. This has potential.

[GenesisOne]

This is the layman's view of Ahab, ignorant of his real purpose for pursuing the whale. Ahab clearly states that he's not out to kill a dumb beast of the sea, but to kill everything the whale embodies—evil, injustice, and cruel fate.

But wherein do the whale's motivations lie?  I can easily compare the whale to Lavos, which the characters saw as inherently evil, raising intelligent creatures for harvest and slowly destroying the planet they inhabited.  Should I accredit the same concepts of evil, injustice, and cruel fate to the whale as well?

How is fate terrible?  Fate is not a person, place, or thing.  It is a mindset about how we perceive events.  Fate is something that will happen to you no matter what you do.  Fate is blind.  It doesn't care about your moral predisposition because it doesn't have the capacity to do so.  If Ahab understood this, then we wouldn't be in the predicament he got himself into (but then again, isn't all conflict drama?  The irony of it all...)

[GenesisOne]

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”

A sober cannibal will kill you and eat you in his own time, especially if you're asleep.  A drunken Christian would already be passed out because they don't drink and therefore can't hold their liquor.  He wouldn't harm you, unlike the cannibal.

[FaustWolf]

What ZeaLitY's doing on Reddit is essentially a form of community organizing, Obama-style. The thing about community organizing is that it's difficult to measure your personal efficicacy; I think it does make a difference at the margin, so to speak, and the question is whether that marginal difference is worth one's personal effort. But what's cool about the Reddit initiative is that it combines new media directly with peer-to-peer outreach. I'd be willing to entertain that it's possible for ZeaLitY to be more effective doing this than going door-to-door, and trying to get others to put in physical footwork. Depends on whether face-to-face contact is equivalent to digital contact. It's all about bang for the buck.

I can't say for certain whether Z's Reddit initiative has made a huge difference for the feminist movement, but judging from the history of that subreddit and the fact that about 30 more people have subscribed there since this started just a couple days ago, I'd wager quite confidently that the level of energy in that subreddit has increased substantially.

But don't worry too much about ZeaLitY; I myself have devoted several full days to what is possibly the most useless activity in service of feminism -- creating a fan trailer/anime music video for an anime I consider feminist-compatible. It's also a social experiment to help me judge whether media with implicit messages can have the same impact and exposure as the written and spoken word. Though I really enjoy this sort of thing, so at least I'm getting something out of it even if it fails in its goal of maximizing societal exposure to feminist media. Call it...an ultimate whaling experience.

[ZeaLitY]

This is the layman's view of Ahab, ignorant of his real purpose for pursuing the whale. Ahab clearly states that he's not out to kill a dumb beast of the sea, but to kill everything the whale embodies—evil, injustice, and cruel fate.

But wherein do the whale's motivations lie?  I can easily compare the whale to Lavos, which the characters saw as inherently evil, raising intelligent creatures for harvest and slowly destroying the planet they inhabited.  Should I accredit the same concepts of evil, injustice, and cruel fate to the whale as well?

How is fate terrible?  Fate is not a person, place, or thing.  It is a mindset about how we perceive events.  Fate is something that will happen to you no matter what you do.  Fate is blind.  It doesn't care about your moral predisposition because it doesn't have the capacity to do so.  If Ahab understood this, then we wouldn't be in the predicament he got himself into (but then again, isn't all conflict drama?  The irony of it all...)

Ahab is insane. He perceives the whale as representing these things. His insanity makes him a tragic hero. You're trying to apply reasoning to insanity.

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”

A sober cannibal will kill you and eat you in his own time, especially if you're asleep.  A drunken Christian would already be passed out because they don't drink and therefore can't hold their liquor.  He wouldn't harm you, unlike the cannibal.

Queequeg was not going to eat Ishmael, nor any Nantucket, as he'd be killed or thrown in jail and thus prevented from living his life and serving Yojo. He's a cannibal by origin.

[Radical_Dreamer]

A sober cannibal will kill you and eat you in his own time, especially if you're asleep.  A drunken Christian would already be passed out because they don't drink and therefore can't hold their liquor.  He wouldn't harm you, unlike the cannibal.

The quote has more to do with alcohol than with either cannibals or Christians. Furthermore, Christians drink.

[Radical_Dreamer]

An artist is attempting to illustrate every page of Moby Dick:

http://everypageofmobydick.blogspot.com/