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"Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!"
Would to God these blessed calms would last.
Starbuck lowly murmured:— "Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's eyes!— Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe."
The Dying Whale
Beautiful chapter.
Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune's favorites sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out.
Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!"
As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent's tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm—"God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! 't is an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this."
As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners did run from him in a terror of dismay.
I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though.
But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom with him?—Yes,
The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.
A most malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?
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.
For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did plainly say— We two watchmen never rest.
And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion— most seen here at the Equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.
Hot!
From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty— forty years ago!—ago!
Ahab is only 58 years old!
Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now?
By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.
"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, 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?
By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.
"There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!"
A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale.
In an instant's compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives.
They were one man, not thirty.
Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed.
Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand
But ere I break, yell hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet.
Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others' hearts what's clinched so fast in mine!—
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! to think's audacity.
I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!"
A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.
But let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there's time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same—the same!— the same to Noah as to me.
Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward, then; the better if the bitterer quarter.
"Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see, it's a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!"
Does Robin Williams recite this in the movie where he plays a teacher at a boys' school?
For when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing—be that end what it may.
Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey's end coming? My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,—beats it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!— stave it off—move, move! speak aloud!—Mast-head there! See ye my boy's hand on the hill?—Crazed; aloft there!— keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:—mark well the whale!— Ho! again!—drive
"Oh! Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!"
Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. "I grow blind; hands! stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is't night?" "The whale! The ship!" cried the cringing oarsmen.
For by how much more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless!
