Oh, won’t ye pull for your duff, my lads – such a sog! such a sogger! Don’t ye love sperm?
Tell a good man that he is free to commit murder, – will he murder? Tell a murderer that at the peril of his soul he indulges in murderous thoughts, – will that make him a saint?
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.
This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, A Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.
Pueden ustedes llamarme Ismael.
Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself.
Oh, grassy glades! oh ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye, – though long parched by the dead drought of the earthly life, – in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.
How now!” they shouted; “Dar’st thou measure this our god! That’s for us.” “Aye, priests – well, how long do ye make him, then?
How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?
Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through!
What a delightful, lazy, languid time we had whilst we were thus gliding along!
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
My cheek blanches white while I write; I start at the scratch of my pen; my own mad brood of eagles devours me; fain would I unsay this audacity; but an iron-mailed hand clenches mine in a vice, and prints down every letter in my spite.
But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw – thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand – a lipless, unfeatured blank.
I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury or in any way draws down public applause but in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat do a snug business among rich mens bonds and mortgages and title deeds.
Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; 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.
The air was sultry and still, as if full of spent thunderbolts.
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish.