Humans have always been drawn to beauty. Of course, beauty standards change all the time. What one culture considers beautiful, another might consider ugly. What our own culture considered beautiful 200 years ago, or even 50, isn’t beautiful to us anymore. But that hasn’t changed the fact that we love to look at beautiful things, and even more than that, we wish to be beautiful ourselves.
Often in literature, Ahab is viewed as a manic, almost inhuman character, so far gone to his revenge that he is not even recognizable anymore. However, I would argue that we can all have Ahab in us from time to time. Not only can we get obsessive about things, but we tend to place all our hopes and dreams onto things that can’t make all our problems go away. But the more steady your ship is, the easier it will be to sail through turbulent waters.