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Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
他往往被非常逼真而消耗精力的夜梦弄得不得不从吊铺上爬起来，这些日有所思。夜有所梦的紧张梦景，又把思潮继续带到如癫如狂的战阵里，在他那熊熊烈火的脑壳里不停地打旋，旋得他那唯一的生命之火激成难抑的苦楚；而且有时候，往往是这般情况，即在他这种精神的苦楚把他弄得魂灵出窍时，他体内就似乎豁成一个大坑，交叉的火光都打坑里直射出来，那些该死的恶魔都在招呼他跳下去跟它们在一起；等到他体内这个地狱大张其口的时候，通船便会听到一阵狂叫声；接着，亚哈就瞪着双眼，打他的舱室里冲了出来，仿佛是从一只着了火的床铺里逃出来。然而这一切，也许不能说是他暴露了他的压制不住的弱点，也不能说是他对自己的决心有所动摇，而只能说是它那剧烈的程度的最明白的表现。因为，在这种时候，疯疯癫癫的亚哈，这个深谋远虑、决不妥协、信心坚决的白鲸猎手；这个已经上了他那只吊铺的亚哈，使他那么一吓又打吊铺冲了出来的，并不是什么动力，动力本来就是他的永恒长存的本原，或者是他的灵魂；睡觉的时候，因为是暂时跟那具有特性的精神失去了联系(这种精神，平时是用来做它的外界的传达手段和动力的)，精神就自然而然地想摆脱那种狂乱的事物的热烈的接触，精神也就暂时不是一个整体了。但是，因为精神如不与灵魂相结合，精神就不可能存在，因此，就亚哈的情况说来，精神一定已经是把他种种思想和想象都化成他那唯一的最高的目的了；这种目的，全然由于它本身的宿愿所驱使，不得不由反抗鬼神而成为目的本身的一种独断独行。独来独往的东西。而且，当它一跟通常的活力相结合时，就会凶猛地表现出来，燃烧起来，逃避得了一切无缘无由的恐吓。因此，当亚哈从他房间里奔出来的时候，他肉眼所闪出来的那种苦恼的神色，好象暂时就是一种空泛泛的东西，是一个不具形体的梦游病者，是一线天然的光，而且确实没有什么色彩，因此，就其本身说来，只是一片空白而已。愿上帝扶助你啊，老人，你的思潮已在你身上创造出了一个生物。他的紧张的思潮已经使他成为一个普罗米修斯了。鹰隼永远在啄食着那个心胸，那只鹰隼就正是他所创造的生物。
