Call me Ishmael. Years ago, finding myself poor and aimless on land, I decided to sail and view the watery world. This is my method for curing melancholy and regulating my blood. Whenever my mouth grows grim, or my soul feels like a damp, drizzly November, I know it is time to leave. The urge becomes undeniable when I pause before coffin before warehouses, trail behind funerals, or feel a manic impulse to knock hats off in the street. Going to sea is my alternative to suicide. While Cato died on his sword with a flourish, I quietly board a ship. This impulse is not unique; almost all men feel a magnetic pull toward the ocean.
Ahab counters with something deeper. All visible objects are but pasteboard masks. Behind them moves some unknown reasoning thing. If man will strike, he must strike through the mask. The White Whale is that wall shoved near to him. He sees in it outrageous strength sinewed with inscrutable malice. He would strike the sun if it insulted him. He overwhelms Starbuck with rhetoric, pointing to the crew’s eagerness, the futility of resistance. Starbuck’s silence voices his submission. He murmurs a foreboding prayer.
Ahab seizes the moment. He calls for grog, orders the harpooneers to produce their weapons, and gathers the mates with crossed lances. He attempts to shock his fiery emotion into them through the joined steel, but the mates quail and look away. Ahab declares it just as well—they might have dropped dead from the full force. He appoints the mates cupbearers to his three pagan kinsmen, the harpooneers. He fills the harpoon sockets with spirits, creating murderous chalices. The men drink and swear death to Moby Dick, bound now in an indissoluble league. Starbuck pales and shivers. The crew disperses, and Ahab retires to his cabin, the pact sealed.
With the crew dismissed and the oath sworn, Ahab retreated to solitude as the sun began its descent, the weight of the newly forged compact settling upon him as he withdrew from the world.
Alone in his cabin at sunset, Ahab gazes through the stern window and feels the Iron Crown of Lombardy weighing on his brow. Its jagged edge galls him; its gems flash beyond his sight. His high perception damns him, stripping the power to enjoy beauty—he stands in Paradise yet cannot taste it. He turns from the window satisfied with his conquest of the crew. Like a match that wastes itself to ignite powder, he has fired them all. He embraces the prophecy of his dismemberment and vows to dismember his dismemberer. Let the gods come forth and try to swerve him. His soul runs on iron rails, unswerving, rushing over gorges and through mountains toward his fixed purpose.
As Ahab retreats into the iron certainty of his purpose, the dying light that could not soften him falls instead upon Starbuck, who lingers at the mainmast and finds his own soul overmatched by his captain’s unyielding will. Where Ahab exulted in the crew’s submission, Starbuck can only lament the miserable office that binds him to a man he both pities and cannot defy, the same dusk that marked Ahab’s cold triumph now illuminating the first mate’s quiet despair.
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