after so many years without Bill.
“So, you understand why Ahab is after the whale?” she asks me, well into our discussion. “It’s not about revenge?”
“No, it’s not revenge. Ahab isn’t after the whale.”
“Ahab isn’t after the whale?”
“Nope.”
“Captain Ahab isn’t hunting Moby Dick?”
“Nope.”
“Well, okay, that’s quite a statement. What is he hunting?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“But it’s not Moby Dick?”
“No, Moby Dick is what’s in the way. Moby Dick is what needs to be negated. Ahab is trying to go further and Moby Dick is blocking his way, so Moby Dick is the enemy. Remember the gateless gate thing from Damnedest?”
She thinks and says yes.
“That’s exactly what Moby Dick is to Ahab. Moby Dick is a seemingly huge and impassable barrier against which Ahab must pit himself absolutely, with no hope or thought of success.”
“And that’s one of your two epiphanies about the book?”
“No, that much is pretty clear. Ahab says that Moby Dick is the wall between him and freedom. That’s why the whale is white; it’s like a blank screen onto which we can project our own obstacle to freedom. The first of my two epiphanies is that Moby-Dick is one of the world’s great spiritual books. Not a whaling tale or a sea adventure, but a spiritual inquiry, and a breathtaking one. Probably foolish to try to rate something like this, but from a practical point of view I’d say it’s the most accurate map of the spiritual terrain ever produced and, therefore, the most useful spiritual book ever written and, therefore, the best book period. Or so my reasoning goes.”

Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment
Jed McKenna

"So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick