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.
Pages:
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309