Ahab’s Prior Severe Ivory Leg Injury
For all his pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. Not very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground and insensible. By some inexplicable casualty, his ivory limb had been so violently displaced that it had stake-wise smitten and all but pierced his groin. The agonizing wound required extreme difficulty to cure entirely.
Ahab’s Musings on Grief and Sorrow
The injury prompted Ahab’s dark philosophical musings on the nature of suffering. He meditated that all miserable events beget their like, but more than equally—with both the ancestry and posterity of Grief going further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. Ahab reasoned that while some natural enjoyments shall have no children born to them for the other world, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave. He concluded that while the highest earthly felicities have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, all heartwoes carry a mystic significance and in some men an archangelic grandeur. The ineffaceable sad birth-mark in the brow of man is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers, suggesting the gods themselves are not forever glad.
The Secret of Ahab’s Temporary Reclusiveness
A secret is revealed explaining Ahab’s mysterious behavior. For a certain period both before and after the Pequod’s sailing, he had hidden himself away with Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness, seeking speechless refuge among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg’s stated reason proved inadequate. That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary reclusiveness. The accident, remaining moodily unaccounted for by Ahab, invested itself with supernatural terrors among the small circle permitted closer approach to him. Through their zeal, they had conspired to muffle up the knowledge of this incident from others, so it did not transpire upon the Pequod’s decks until considerable time had elapsed.
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