Starbuck: What is this bee swarm and this shark swarm, this swarm of aquatic insects and this swarm of great sea monsters? What are these parasites, attaching themselves to my skin like barnacles, nourishing themselves on my skin, growing and growing and growing, becoming large and hideous? I believe you are nothing but a phantom, that I am nothing but a phantom, that we are the shadows of the fingernails of something that has more reality, that we are the scent on the skin of something that has more reality. We are not solid, you and I; we are not flesh, we are not real. These globes of light that constantly descend from the sky and into the water, and ascend from the water into the sky, they are we, we appear to them as they appear to us, they are just like us, we are they. I know now why I am locked up behind iron doors, in a tomb at the bottom of the sea, guarded by sea monsters and peril, tied up, shut in, unable to move, unable to breathe, made to sit and do nothing but live, made to be forever still, doing nothing but being living. You are my little monster: I know you: you are the terrible teeth that descended upon me many nights as I slept in life. Thou art it; it art thou; thou art a thing, not a man, an object, not a subject.