Ahab: Is there any truth in the terrible melancholy I feel? Is there any truth at all in this sorrow that overtakes me, in the tears I cannot let out of my eyes, in the thorns that lie tangled all about my heart? Is there any truth in any of this, or is it all mere absurd nonsense, the stuff of fantasy and dreams? Is it a more solid truth than the fields of wave that stretch on about us? Is there more truth in the sting of a pricked finger than in a stone or a valley or a mountain? Don’t hold back—speak, if you can. O I am so confused, I am so very confused by all this. Here there is nothing solid, no rope to hang onto, everything drifts and wavers, there is no solid reality like stone or iron. You don’t understand these things any more than I understand them—you are as confused by all these things as I am—you cannot see through these winding fogs any more than me. I am lost in the jungles of my own being—there are dangerous beasts and poisonous beasts everywhere—there is no sweetness in my being—there are no pleasant gardens in my being. Were I to enter those gardens in the stars, with rivers running across the stars, I would be a terrible contamination, I would be the black heart, the thing stalking prey in paradise, the tiger in the garden paradise. O there is nothing solid within me, I am cut off from everything real, I am made of a great chasm, filled with fog and mystery and many terrors. Where is my sweet wife, O, where is my gentle wife and gentle daughters, with lovely dresses and potted plants? I feel I’ve done a terrible wrong—I hang my head in guilt, and I can never return to the world of lovely dresses and potted plants again.