Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!

That line:

Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck

It sticks with me like butter.

Now I call on Allah: can You forgive him? Can You forgive Ahab? Can You forgive Diddy? He beat a woman. He beat a woman. Allah can Diddy be forgiven? Ahab stands alone among the millions. Ahab. Stands

[o]n an ivory stubb and Pip is pip install nowadays but Pip, poor Pip:

"Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man!—and a black! and crazy!——but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again."
"They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin. But."

            ... "But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye."

Pip has gone mad at this point and speaks as if he is outside himself and perhaps as if by inspiration? Both Ahab and Pip are mad mad men.

"Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
        Listen,

    and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!——Met!
TRUE ART THOU, LAD, AS THE CIRCUMFERENCE TO ITS CENTRE. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that,——
    God for ever save thee, let what will befall."


        WHAT AN ODD FEELING, NOW, WHEN a black boy's host to WHITE MEN WITH GOLD LACE UPON THEIR COATS!——Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?——
        a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once;——seen him?

            No!
        Well then, fill up again, captains, and let's drink shame upon all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them!

            Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.——Hist! above there, I hear ivory——Oh, master! master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come join me."

Some notes from the "Northwestern-Newberry" edition:

217.21 Fedallah] That this Arabic name would be an impossible one for a Parsee is asserted by Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent in their Hendricks House edition of Moby-Dick (New York, 1952), p. 732; their assertion is refuted by Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein, in Melvill's Orienda (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1961), p.228...

I watch as it trails off to a man named Stewart calling Melville careless.
Careless Melville. He wrote America's first Great Novel. America. This book reeks of America.

---

"Herman Melville's composition of Moby-Dick, a dawdling, on-and-off affair"—might I interject a notion at this juncture?

Here is the reason people don't read Melville.

Paglia sees Moby-Dick as "a sexual reply to The Scarlet Letter" and I've got nothing else on that but moving on I quote her at length in what follows because I love her. Because she is right?

"...correct a sexual exclusion, but Moby-Dick's worldview is vaster."

"hermaphroditizes the great whale"

one of the "novel's supreme moments" quoting Paglia: Quoting Melville: "A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling curling curling—

God is "gender-neutral" _(cheers of "yes" and "right")_ and it's true that Melville cannot "bear to leave his loom gender-netural"

Back to Pip:

"Twenty pages later comes the first mention of the male weaver, when a castaway loses his wits and sees 'God's foot upon the treadle of the loom.'"

Confession: I can't spell Paglia without looking and Camille Paglia is——

            an enemy to Melville's
                "real heaven":"all-male platoon each with his hand in someone else's pocket. The circle jerk is another Romantic:"

uroboros

An interlude from Bob Dylan on Moby-Dick: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/

A wonderful summary of the book! But he fails to mention Pip? Perhaps this is my purpose?

But I am a white man and I am nasty. I see the ghosts. I say God is one. Like America is one. God is in America. I quote. What can I say? I am just a man. Just giving a warning. Just waiting like you are waiting—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

'no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;'