I Dont Know Why This Part Broke Me, But This Part Broke Me:

I don’t know why this part broke me, but this part broke me:

I think that there’s something so stubborn and childlike about it, and in the previous chapter (“the symphony”), Melville describes:

“the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.”

And the way Starbuck speaks to him is almost like a young father to a child, not trying to reason with him but to appeal to speak to his best self; the self that retains agency and control over inexplicable desires that are so very human of us, and certainly not foreign to him:

Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s—wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!—this instant let me alter the course!

I think it is perhaps the desperate outpouring of emotion that arises precisely because this is the point of no return. This confession is not something they will have to live with, or live down.

A childish and stubborn and truthful train of thought, one I think we’ve all experienced to some extent: I want, I want, I want—without knowing how, or why.

7.8.24

"That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop."

To me this is one of the most moving passages of the whole book so far. The visual of the of the cruel and indifferent universe hugging Ahab and that allowing him to cry a single tear. That tear being more valuable than the entire Pacific.

Out of Touch

"There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!"

my second favorite thing in Nosferatu (1922) is when it cuts to the "werewolf" and it's a hyena with the saddest gentlest eyes you've ever seen