Call Me Ahab

I found my Moby Dick at last, and he's some kind of a stroke victim now. If Ahab found his whale in that condition, would he stopped acting like a madman? Would he have become rational and gone home, leaving the beast to mind his own business, the way he always did - except in my story, without all his marbles? The point of Moby Dick is that Ahab probably wouldn't have come to his senses. To ascribe such malignancy and power to a dumb beast isn't, after all, any more or less ridiculous than being in love with a person who over the years has become mentally impaired, or just plain nuts.

And so I am Ahab. My feeble-minded or insane Moby Dick is still the measure of everything I always wanted, but couldn't have, and of all my failures and inadequacies. He would fix everything when I found him, I believed. I found him at last - and I cried for three days.