White Light Black Light

"The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.

That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning, to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in the statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously tranferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated against it.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.

He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and, then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it"

- Herman Melville - Moby-Dick, Chapter 41

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its feature from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!

-- Captain Ahab -- Moby Dick -- Herman Melville, 1851

// posted by Alice @ Thursday, July 21, 2005