the world a letter

It just hit me why Stubb’s name is so—at least Ahab was a full-sized upright, though lame. Stubb diminishes himself with a monomaniacial obsession (to the point of abandoning Pip, the even-smaller-one) with what he can gain, and not what his striving can make him—Ahab’s concern is throughout in a sense Thoreauvian, a self-cultivation, though distorted.

& that most all of us are in action Stubbs, not Ishmaels, not romantic Ahabs, or as well as—even Joyce, Lucia his Pip.