Thus I Blow Out the Last Fear

In Chapter 118, Ahab takes his noon sighting, calculates his latitude with precision, and then looks at the instrument that told him exactly where he stands. He calls it a "foolish toy." He says it can only tell him "the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be." He dashes it to the deck. He stomps on it. He destroys it.

The quadrant worked. That was the problem.

Here is what I think is happening in these chapters — 111 through 119, the approach to the climax — and why the quadrant matters more than the harpoon.

In Chapter 111, the Pequod enters the Pacific. Ishmael calls it "the sea of his adoption." He describes the ocean as made of "drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still." It is the widest, deepest, most final water in the world. And as the ship glides through it, Ahab stands at his post with two nostrils. One "unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking)." The other "consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming."

Both at once. The sweetness and the hunt. Ahab can still smell the Bashee isles. He can still register the information that somewhere, mild lovers are walking in sweet woods. He has not lost the capacity to perceive beauty. What he has done is decide that it doesn't count — that the sweetness is real but irrelevant, a fact about the world that does not constitute a claim on him.

This is different from blindness. Blindness would be simpler, more tragic in a sympathetic way. What Melville shows us is something more disturbing: a man fully capable of perceiving the good, who has decided his own perception of the good is not data worth acting on.

Chapter 114 — "The Gilder" — shows us all three men over the same golden sea on the same golden afternoon.

Starbuck gazes down into the water and says: "Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe." This is deliberate, chosen enchantment. He knows what's under there — the sharks, the cannibal ways — and he chooses to look past it and believe. Faith as an active discipline.

Stubb leaps up in the same golden light: "I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!" Stubb's relationship to beauty is pure impersonation — he performs his own good nature so completely that he has become it. There's no gap between the act and the feeling.

Then Ahab. Melville writes: "if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing."

His breath. Not the sharks, not the whale, not the darkness beneath the surface. His own breath. He arrives at the beauty and immediately spoils it — not from ignorance, not from blindness, but as an act. The tarnishing is active. He brings his own corrosion to the golden moment. He knows what he's doing. He does it anyway.

This is what I mean when I say the tragedy of these chapters isn't blindness. It's knowing.

Then the quadrant.

He has been using the quadrant all voyage. It does what it's designed to do — it tells him, within acceptable error, where on the ocean's surface he currently stands. This is information. Most navigators consider it the most essential information a ship can have. But Ahab looks at the instrument and sees its limitation as its nature: "what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet?"

The quadrant can only locate him. It cannot locate the whale. It cannot point at what he wants. It can only point at where he stands.

To a man who has spent years calculating his own position relative to one fixed point — Moby Dick — the discovery that an instrument is about him, not about the whale, is an offense. An accurate self-locator is useless to someone who has decided that self-location is not the relevant project. The quadrant insults him by assuming he is still the kind of creature who needs to know where he is.

So he destroys it. He will navigate by "the level ship's compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by log and by line." Navigation toward the whale. Instruments that track heading and speed rather than position. Tools that locate him in relation to his target rather than in relation to the world.

This is not irrationality. This is perfectly consistent logic from a starting premise that has gone badly wrong. If you accept that your own position in the world is no longer information worth having — if you have surrendered yourself as a data point — then yes, an instrument that accurately locates you is a piece of equipment that fails at its real job. Smash it.

The harpoon has been forged by Perth, tempered in the blood of the three harpooneers, baptized not in nomine patris but in nomine diaboli. In the typhoon of Chapter 119, St. Elmo's fire appears — corpusants — on the three masthead tips, three white flames like "gigantic wax tapers before an altar." Queequeg's tattooing burns like "Satanic blue flames on his body." The harpoon itself, locked in its crotch at the boat's prow, catches its own pale flame.

Ahab stands before the fire. He grabs the lightning chains. He puts his foot on the Parsee. He speaks to the fire in the second person, as to a god: "I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance."

Starbuck grabs him by the arm. "God, God is against thee, old man." The crew runs for the braces — half-mutiny in the storm. Ahab takes the burning harpoon and waves it like a torch to hold them back. The crew retreats.

Then: "All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine." He turns. The harpoon has its pale flame. He looks at it.

"Thus I blow out the last fear."

He extinguishes the flame.

What is fear, in this context?

It's easy to read this as heroic. A man so committed to his purpose that he has transcended the final cowardice. He blows out fear the way you'd blow out a candle before bed — domestic, final, complete. "Last fear" implies the others are already gone. He has been working toward this.

But go back to Chapter 109, where Starbuck says: "Let Ahab beware of Ahab." And Ahab hears it. The brow unknots. He says "there's something there!" — and for a moment, something genuine passes over him. The possibility of turning. Then the tide closes back, and he fixes the leaking casks not from any moral transformation but from what Melville carefully calls "prudential policy." He heard the voice. He continued anyway.

That moment — the hearing-and-continuing — is the tragedy. Not blindness. Not deafness. He is not some figure incapable of imagining the move outside his own framework of desire. He imagines it. He sees it. He hears it. He closes his hand around it and lets it go.

"Thus I blow out the last fear" is the conclusion of that process. Fear was the last thing holding his own position in the world as information worth having. Fear is what connected him to himself — the part that still knew where he stood, still could smell the Bashee isles with one nostril and register that this sweetness constituted a claim. Blowing it out feels like freedom. It is self-erasure.

The harpoon was forged. The quadrant was smashed. The fear was extinguished. The whale is still out there.

What remains?

A personality, he says. "In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here." He claims this as his last assertion against the fire. He is a someone, not a nothing, standing before the vast impersonal.

But this is the same move that destroyed the quadrant. He is claiming the value of his personality at exactly the moment he has finished dismantling the evidence of it. A man who has blown out his last fear, smashed the instrument that could locate him, tarnished every golden moment with his own breath — what personality remains, exactly? Which self?

There is a self. That's what Melville is so careful to show us. Ahab is not a monster who cannot see. He is a man who could see and has chosen, step by step, deliberate step, to extinguish each of the instruments that told him where he stood.

A personality stands here. He's right. The tragedy is that he has spent three years making it as small as possible, until the only thing left of it is the drive that ate everything else.

Thus I blow out the last fear. He thinks this is the fire in him speaking. He doesn't know it's the echo of what he was.