Uncompromised Simplicity
His uncompromised simplicity emerges from a life of wandering that rubbed away all outward clingings. He becomes a stripped abstract, an unfractioned integral, uncompromised as a newborn, living without premeditated reference to this world or the next.
The Living Tool
The carpenter functions as a living tool, compared to a Sheffield pocket knife containing blades, screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, and nail-filers. His brain, if it existed, must have early oozed into his finger muscles, making him a pure manipulator responding to whatever function his superiors require.
The Solipsizing Sentinel
Despite his tool-like nature, the carpenter contains an unaccountable life-principle that anomalously does its duty. This cunning essence keeps him soliloquizing much of the time, like an unreasoning wheel humming to itself. His body serves as a sentry-box where this internal watchman talks continuously to maintain vigilance and ward off stagnation.
第一百零八章 Ahab and the Carpenter.
The scene opens with the Carpenter at his vice-bench during the First Night Watch, laboring to shape an ivory joist into a replacement leg while sneezing from the bone dust that irritates him. When Ahab arrives for a fitting, he engages the Carpenter in a philosophical exchange about phantom limb sensations and his longing to be free from dependency on the craftsman’s work, reflecting bitterly on how a proud man must nevertheless depend upon an ordinary workman for the means to stand. The conversation takes an absurd turn when Ahab orders an imaginary complete man constructed to perfect specifications, prompting the bewildered Carpenter to question whether he is being spoken to at all. After Ahab departs with his mysterious pronouncements, the Carpenter resumes his filing while reflecting on the captain’s strangeness, acknowledging that Stubb’s assessment of Ahab as “queer” captures something essential about the man’s peculiar nature and hard-driven demeanor.
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