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Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
‘One can be a cannibal and a good man, just as one can be a glutton and honest. One does not exclude the other.’
- Conseil speaking, Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas" (William Butcher translation)
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
Get riches first, get wealth, and treasure heap—
Not difficult, if thou hearken to me.
Riches are mine, fortune is in my hand;
They whom I favour thrive in wealth amain,
While virtue, valour, wisdom, sit in want.
(Satan, "Paradise Regained")
hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling;
Quoted in Season 3 of "The X-Files," episode 22 ("Quagmire")
But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
"In that despair my enemy was my only hope"
- Gandalf speaking of his battle with the Balrog under the Earth in JRR Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings"
I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.
Quoted in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" (1982), with changes:
"I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia, and 'round the Antares Maelstrom, and 'round perdition's flames before I give him up!"
Ahab's line is also quoted directly in the 1956 and 1998 adaptations of "Moby-Dick," the latter starring Patrick Stewart as Ahab.
The first of two mentions of Leviathan in "Paradise Lost": "that sea-beast Leviathan, which God of all his works / Created hugest that swim th’ Océan stream: / Him haply slumb’ring on the Norway foam."
In JRR Tolkien's "Silmarillion," Feanor sets out on a hopeless war against evil, declaring, "We will never turn back from pursuit. After Morgoth to the ends of the Earth!"
He tasks me;
Quoted in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" (1982)
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.
Quoted in "Star Trek VIII: First Contact" (1996)
From Lew Wallace's "Ben-Hur" (1880): "To all my grievances, I would add those of the world, and devote myself to vengeance."
Jeff Pickering liked this
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.
William Hurt depicts this in Ahab quite well in the 2011 movie
Jeff Pickering liked this
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?
"Dear Duncan, You color with me, but why? Most of the time I’m the same
color as the page you are using me on –WHITE. If I didn’t have a black outline, you wouldn’t even know I was THERE! I’m not even used to color SNOW or to fill in empty space between other things. And it leaves me feeling… well… empty. We need to talk. Your empty friend, White Crayon"
- The Day the Crayons Quit
"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!" "Where-away?" "On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!" Instantly all was commotion. The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his genus. "There go flukes!"
This is quoted in the graphic novel "Bone," volume 3 (Eyes of the Storm), chapters 1-2. The same sequence also plays on Pip going overboard and the final episode with the coffin.
See also the "October 13" example in "Extracts"
when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it.
As with Danglars and Edmond Dantes aboard the Pharaon in "The Count of Monte Cristo." Dantes is first mate and technically above Danglars, who is however 'supercargo,' an overseer of cargo on behalf of the ship's owner. Danglars in fact disputed Dantes right to succeed their deceased captain without consulting anyone, and when Dantes is later imprisoned, Danglars is promptly made captain.
Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.
But he breaches!
Melville was an early adherent of the "Jaws" principle: keep the monster mysterious and unseen until the end.
For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself;
Or board the Nautilus, with its movie-size window panes.
From Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas" (1869):
"I had never before had the chance to observe living creatures that could move freely in their natural element."
(William Butcher translation)
where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned;
From Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove":
" 'It’s all right, though,' Augustus said. 'It’s mostly bones we’re riding over, anyway. Why, think of all the buffalo that have died on these plains. Buffalo and other critters too. And the Indians have been here forever; their bones are down there in the earth. I’m told that over in the Old Country you can’t dig six feet without uncovering skulls and leg bones and such. People have been living there since the beginning, and their bones have kinda filled up the ground. It’s interesting to think about, all the bones in the ground. But it’s just fellow creatures, it’s nothing to shy from.' It was such a startling thought—that under him, beneath the long grass, were millions of bones—that Newt stopped feeling so strained. He rode beside Mr. Gus, thinking about it, the rest of the night."
Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest. Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?
There is a similarly terrifying vision of a man fallen overboard, in Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables" (Book II, Ch. 8, "The Deep and the Dark"), published in 1862:
"His pathetic head is but a speck in the enormity of the waves. ... What a ghostly vision that retreating sail is! .... He was there only a moment ago ... He is in the monstrous waters. He has nothing underfoot any more but shifting and treacherousness. The billows torn and chopped by the wind surround him hideously, the heavings of the deep overwhelm him, all the watery raggedness thrashes round his head; a mob of waves spews over him, blurred openings half devour him. Every time he goes under he glimpses precipices filled with darkness, frightful alien vegetations seize him, bind his feet, draw him towards them. He feels that he is becoming the deep, he is part of the spume, the waves toss him from one to another, he drinks bitterness, the craven ocean is furiously intent on drowning him, hugeness toys with him as he perishes. It seems as if all this water were hatred.... There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human tribulations. But what can they do for him? They fly, sing and soar, while he draws his dying breath.... He feels simultaneously buried by those two infinities, the ocean and the sky: the one is a tomb, the other a shroud."
In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.
Compare to this passage about the hunting of buffalo in Louise Erdrich's "Makoons":
"The buffalo provided the fuel for fires that smoked their own meat. They gave their brains, fat and liver to be used in tanning their own hides. They provided tools with their bones that could be sharpened and used to flesh their carcasses. All winter, they had kept their killers warm and snug under curly robes. Indeed, as Little Shell had said in his prayer, the buffalo were a most generous animal."
I was blind as a bat—both eyes out—all befogged and bedeadened with black foam—the
Holy alliterating alligators, Batman!
No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
She made his arms and legs more powerful,
and set in him the courage of a fly,
who works so hard and so persistently,
yearning to bite a human being’s flesh
because she loves the taste of human blood.
This was the boldness that the goddess put
inside the inmost heart of Menelaus,
(Homer, "The Iliad")
a monograph on the ant, as treated by Solomon, showing the harmony of the book of Proverbs with the results of modern research.
(George Eliot, "Middlemarch")
one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.
"Mutations" is correct in a strict Darwinian description of extinctions, though Melville may not have meant it that way
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!"
As the king declares in Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris" (1831):
"The day must surely come when in France there will be only one king, one lord, one judge, one headsman, just as in paradise there is only one God!"
Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let's down." "What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's hand, and feeling it. "Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and
...more
Ahab's most human moment, and one of Melville's best
"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?
"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." (Romans 7:15)
And here again the influence of Shakespeare on Melville is apparent. Ahab shares with Shakespeare's tragic figures an inability to understand what drives him, a theme explored by A.C. Bradley in his book, "Shakespearean Tragedy."
Bradley also argues that what we might call a tendency toward obsession appears to be, for Shakespeare, "the fundamental tragic trait". The Bard's tragic figures --
"....are exceptional beings. We have seen already that the hero, with Shakespeare, is a person of high degree or of public importance, and that his actions or sufferings are of an unusual kind. But this is not all. His nature also is exceptional, and generally raises him in some respect much above the average level of humanity....by an intensification of the life which they share with others, they are raised above them; and the greatest are raised so far that, if we fully realize all that is implied in their words and actions, we become conscious that in real life we have known scarcely any one resembling them. Some, like Hamlet and Cleopatra, have genius. Others, like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, are built on the grand scale; and desire, passion, or will attains in them a terrible force. In almost all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of mind. This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait. It is present in his early heroes, Romeo and Richard II, infatuated men, who otherwise rise comparatively little above the ordinary level. It is a fatal gift, but it carries with it a touch of greatness; and when there is joined to it nobility of mind, or genius, or immense force, we realize the full power and reach of the soul, and the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which stirs not only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror, and awe."
he raised a gull-like cry in the air. "There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!"
Khan spots the Enterprise in a similar moment in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan", crying out, "There she is! There she is! Not so wounded as we were led to believe. So much the better!"
A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.
Welcome to Jurassic Park
Ahab could discover no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep
...more
There is a moment like this in the Mutara Nebula battle from "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." Kirk, trying to find Khan's ship in the obscure nebula, suddenly recognizes the outline of that ship coming straight at the Enterprise, and he orders a sudden turn with the direction "evasive starboard!"
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. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
Ahab is speaking of himself in the third person here, when he says that Ahab "never thinks" and "only feels."
Santiago, the old fisherman in Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea", constantly tells himself not to think, as he struggles to rein in the huge marlin. Like Ahab, he constantly thinks, even at times like a poet or a philosopher, and like Ahab he struggles to rein in his mind. Examples of what he tells himself while out alone on his boat:
"Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man."
"Don't think, old man. Sail on this course and take it when it comes."
"Do not think about sin."
"You think too much, old man."
"All I must do is keep the head clear."
And from the narrator:
"He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure."
"But he liked to think about all things that he was involved in and since there was nothing to read and he did not have a radio, he thought much and he kept on thinking about sin."
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale;
From Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea":
"But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
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.
Quoted in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" (1982)
the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main.
From Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables" (1862):
"To embark on death is sometimes the way to avoid foundering. And the coffin lid becomes a life-saver."
