Lower Away

It was a clear steel-blue day. Air and sea barely distinguishable at the equator — the gentle feminine sky above, the masculine depths below, one at the horizon's girdling line. Melville describes the world as bride and groom, as two things that are also one. Into this comes Ahab: "tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin."

He leans over the side and watches his own shadow sink.

Then something breaks open. The world — which Melville calls "the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding" — throws its arms around him. The air strokes and caresses him. And from beneath his slouched hat, Ahab drops a tear into the sea.

"Nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop."

That line is the hinge of the chapter, and possibly of the book. The Pacific has been Ahab's obsession — its wealth, meaning the whale, meaning the revenge, meaning the fixed purpose that has piloted the Pequod across three oceans. But the tear outweighs all of it. He knows this. He drops it and he knows.

Starbuck comes. He hears — Melville says he hears, not sees — "the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around." He draws close but does not touch. Ahab turns and finds him there, and looks into his eyes, and calls them "the magic glass."

"I see my wife and my child in thine eye."

Then he tells Starbuck everything. The forty years on the pitiless sea. The girl he married past fifty and sailed from the next day. "I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck." The thousand lowerings, the boiling blood, the madness — "more a demon than a man." And the summation that names everything he has been: "what a forty years' fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been!"

He even does this — he looks at Starbuck and says: "lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine."

He is protecting Starbuck. He knows what is coming. He is naming it clearly, warning the man beside him against following him into it, and he cannot stop himself from going.

Starbuck begs. Away. Home. This instant. My Mary, your boy, the hill where he watches every morning for his father's sail. And for a moment — just a moment — Ahab almost hears it. "They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the morning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes."

He can picture it exactly. The boy waking. The mother telling him about the father abroad on the deep. The morning ritual of watching. He is inside this, describing it, and then —

"But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil."

We have frameworks for the tragic hero who is deceived. Oedipus pursued the truth that destroyed him because he could not see what he was walking toward. We have frameworks for the man consumed by passion who cannot see the destruction ahead — Lear in his vanity, Macbeth in his ambition. We have frameworks for blindness.

What we have less of is the framework for what happens in this chapter.

Ahab is not deceived. He is not ignorant. He is not failing to see. He sees his wife and child with perfect clarity. He names his forty-year folly without softening it. He does not tell himself the whale matters more — he asks, genuinely, out loud, to another man: "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?"

He cannot answer his own question because the answer is: not at all. He knows this. And then he turns from Starbuck and lowers away the next morning.

The question he asks is the crucial one: "What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, 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... Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?"

This is not rhetoric. He is asking, seriously, whether the entity now steering the Pequod is "him" in any meaningful sense. He suspects it might not be. He suspects the "I" that saw his wife and child in Starbuck's eye and the "I" that will lower away tomorrow are not the same.

Aristotle called it akrasia — weakness of will, acting against one's better judgment. But akrasia usually describes a moment: the diet broken, the resolution abandoned in a weak hour, the slip under temptation. What Ahab experiences is not a slip. It is structural. The part of him capable of turning toward Nantucket has been so thoroughly consumed by the obsession that it can only observe the compulsion from inside it, name it accurately, ask "is it I?" — and watch the compulsion execute.

The tear is proof of this asymmetry. The grief is real. The tear that outweighs the Pacific is real. The knowledge is real — he has named everything that a man would need to know in order to turn the ship. And none of it can reach the mechanism of action. The insight and the will have been separated. He can see from one side of the glass; he cannot act from the other.

This is the horror underneath the tragedy. Not that Ahab is evil, or mad in the way that precludes understanding. But that identity can be consumed. That a man can become a vehicle for his own fixed purpose in such a way that the part capable of change can only watch, describe the catastrophe accurately, and wait.

Earlier in the book, at the Sphynx chapter, Ahab stood alone over a severed whale's head at noon and demanded it speak. He wanted testimony from the thing that had seen everything the deep holds. The head remained silent. The universe wouldn't give up a syllable.

In The Symphony, the universe offers him everything instead: the mild day, the steel-blue sky, the step-mother's arms, the tear, his wife's face in another man's eye, a real path home. Everything the Sphynx withheld is here. And it is not enough. The universe answered, but Ahab cannot receive the answer because the thing that would act on it has already been used up.

The chapter is named for a musical form that resolves — that takes disparate strands and brings them to a conclusion. Melville uses the title and inverts it. This symphony plays every strand and reaches no resolution. You hear the possibility of a different ending, you hear exactly what that ending would require, and then the next chapter is "The Chase — First Day."

The last image: Ahab crosses to the far rail to gaze over the side. He finds Fedallah already there, motionlessly leaning over the water. The shadow-self, the incarnation of pure purpose at any cost, the choice Ahab made when he assembled this crew and swore them to the hunt — Fedallah is already at the rail. The weeping didn't move him there. Fedallah was already there before the weeping began.

Ahab knew. He saw his wife, his son, forty years of waste, the madness, the demon. He named it all, accurately, to another man, standing in the mild light, on the last morning before the end. He saw Starbuck's face "blanched to a corpse's hue with despair" as the mate turned and stole away.

And then: "Lower away."

That is not blindness. That is the whole thing.