Ahab: Could it be? Could the fortress have fallen, could the walls have been crushed, could the ceiling have collapsed, could the fortress guard have been slaughtered and overtaken? Could the temple have been razed to the ground, could the cords that kept me from falling into hell have snapped, could the cloth have been rent, could the chain have been broken? My rest is not an easy rest, I am still tossed about by confused sensations and more confused thoughts; my rest is not a peaceful rest. What is this burning in my belly? Are there tiny men in my belly, fresh from their savage caves, building wood fires in my belly for worship? O what can all this mean, and why does my heart beat on? O can I not be swallowed up into the sea and blank white sleep? What can all this mean?

And my power is like a shattered crystal, with a thousand scattered lights shining out in different places at random. My heart is divided into a thousand parts, I wander about eternally confused and sleepless, O can I not sleep, can I not rest my mind? I remember never remembering dreamless sleep, I remember the expansive white blankness of dreamless sleep, I remember the white light overtaking everything and wiping all existence away into nothingness. The rest of it! Its peace! Can I not find some tree in this storm to shelter me, can I not rest under the awning of some porch in this rain and sleet, and close my eyes, and forget these expanding fields of blue that surround me? Could the sea be swallowed up in that great white light, that expanding infinite light of the nothingness of dreamless sleep? Could I swallow the whole sea up in my death? Is this why I still live? Because the sea would not be swallowed up into the nothingness of my death?

Is this why babies wail upon being thrust into life? The terrors are twin, the natures are twin, my nature and God’s nature, everything is made of twin nature. What is this flesh, connected here and here to this ship (my foot is welded to the floor, my hand is welded to the desk). What is this flesh, made of the spiritual ectoplasm, wedded to the ship, wedded to my anguished thought so that it burns when my thought burns, so that it becomes a confused and mixed mass with my thought, so that it wavers with the choppy waters of my thought, so that it darts from here to there in strange and warped rays. I am an it; I am not a man. I am a force, a mission, an anger and a passion. I am no longer human. I have lost my gentle heart, I have lost my gentle wife, I have lost the king that used to sit over all my flesh and spirit and tie all of this emotion and thought together into a coherent whole. I am not healthy, and I have left all cures and remedies behind in that other world. There is no remedy for me; I am an it; I am not a man; I am a cockroach or a fork; I am an object and a thing. I cannot create myself; I cannot remake myself; I am frozen forever in that passion I had in death; I am frozen forever in that mission I had before my death; there is no changing this crystal; it has been formed and it will not be transformed; it is no longer malleable flesh but eternal spirit; I have had my chance to enter those gardens in the sky and been left to wither upon the earth, mourning my dried and dead taproot. I have no source of moist life. I am the rot of the undergrowth in autumn, and I shall forever be rotting, I shall forever be withering and freezing and drying out and stinking, I shall forever be cut off from every source of every good thing and be left to enter the hell within me, having nowhere else to go to but into the Hades of my inner life. Like a rotting fish my skin has broken and the hells within me have burst through and made themselves stink to the senses. These are the devils and the demons: they speak, and I obey, just as I did in life, as I will forever in death.