| "It was a clear steel-blue sky. Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea.......'Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind and a mild looking sky. On such a day...I struck my first whale - a boy harpooneer of eighteen! Forty years and a thousand lowerings ago. .....for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! What a forty years fool has old Ahab been. Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance?...is it not hard that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes. But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise....bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! Stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God." |
