Fair Play

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee
from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,
Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

"Hark ye yet again – the little lower layer. All visible objects, man,
are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act,
the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing
puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning
mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner
reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white
whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught
beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous
strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing
is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white
whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy,
man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could
I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play"

Moby Dick (36.38-39) by Herman Melville