Subtle Realization

So... I am Captain Ahab. It's true. I'm Ahab. Now, with respect to the general population, I am an EXCEPTIONALLY well-read individual, and with the exception of JP Sartre's The Words, have never felt so connected to a character as I do Ahab. It is always somewhat startling to read the sentiment of your soul sprawled out on a page in someone else's hand, but there is also something comforting about it. Shared humanity, perhaps.

This all became clear to me as I lay in my bed last night, rereading my bedraggled critical edition of Moby Dick. I've been pacing myself for a while, reading it in conjunction with various and sundry other novels. It's usually the last thing I read before I fall asleep, and last night, after scratching my cat behind her ears and letting her settle in on the blanket beside me, I read this:
"[Ahab:] Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra."

I've also just started reading Ahab's Wife, which one of my aunts recommended, and while I have not felt the immediate connection with it as I did with the great white novel itself, I did very much enjoy the opening quotations, not the least of which being this gem from later in the primary text:
"[Ahab:] Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty - forty - forty years ago! - ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before - and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul - when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey - more a demon than a man! - aye, aye! what a forty years' fool - fool - old 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? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! 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. God! God! God! - crack my heart! - stave my brain! - mockery! mockery! 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. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! - lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!... I have seen them - some summer days in the morning. About this time - yes, it is his noon nap now - the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again... What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new- mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths."

Yes, this may be the best I could ever hope to express. And maybe this is all self-indulgent. I would imagine that most want to be the tragic hero. To go out in a blaze of light or a pslintering battle with something far larger than oneself. Fair enough. Regardless, as the girl who strove to pour herself in the disciplined mold of a model student, who has spent endless night after endless night working over books in the basement of the library, typing at her computer until it took longer to force her eyes to focus than they stayed so-- and why did I do it? Why did I chase down professors and chain myself to the desk when I could have gone out with my associates? For the grade. For the academic supremacy. For a letter on a piece of paper.

And now, as I near the end of my undergrad and the looming prospect of graduate school, I wonder about what a real life would feel like, all the while knowing that I would (if I have my druthers) spend no more than a summer out of academia and then head off to graduate school somewhere for my masters degree. I don't want to spend time with landed obligations in the real world. It is no longer my element.

So, I strive for unrealistic endings. I'm graduating with outrageous honors distinctions, two minors, a major that I have had to fight the administration for every step of the way. Most days, when I talk about this with the odd listener, I claim that this has made me all the stronger, and you only know what you really want when you have to fight for it, that this passion could not have been bred into me at a university which didn't challenge me in unorthodox ways at every turn. This, of course, is mostly crap. It didn't have to be as hard as I have made it to be. And now, like Ahab, I am weary. Still, I'll throw my hat in the ring for another degree from another school and another round of loans which I can't pay off.

Why do I do it? I'm beginning to seriously doubt that it is for any love of learning or desire for the advancement of the field, that's for sure. Aristotle claims that the best and highest form of government, the true aristocracy, is rooted in the love of knowledge and turth. I pretend at this on most days, but here, when I cop to being my most masochistic, as brutally honest as I have delved, my soul is mostly governed by the timocratic element. It is a love of honor, a drive for glory that propels me. While this is the second of the good options for government, I suppose I'm not that bad off. But still... where does it end?

"[Starbuck:]... let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man."