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To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."
"God keep me!—keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.
The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell downright.
Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!"
The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.
Reads like a play.
Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide.
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.
all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
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.
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.
Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale.
He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.
And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.
Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too.
Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.
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.
For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.
I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.
he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it.
The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness.
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.
With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.
?
Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, "All ready there, Fedallah?"
He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing.
Stubb
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.
taking all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. "Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee."
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.
On life and death this old man walked.
Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.
for your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself.
Gam?
New Oxford American Dictionary has it!
Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha's very fine; and ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such information may throw side-light upon my story.'
A digression inside a digression.
But the story.'
Yes--please!
Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, this your story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to press.'
And what sort of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.
the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.
So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like.
it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.
With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!
Ok. Sometimes I love this book.
however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
Consider once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold.
Racist?
When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the american line-tub, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales.
the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.
Is this minutiae central to the book's genius or a distraction? Perhaps It strengthens the metaphorical, epic fantasy of Ahab's quest?
Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?—Gayer
Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whaleboat, when thus hung in hangman's nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.
