Why Achab Biciclette?
“Because Captain Achab’s leg, his sulkiness, his dissatisfaction, his stubbornness and his egocentricity are the sum of what we become at his age, after a life of waiting and delusion.
Because the White Whale is one of the best metaphors for the Unknown, the cause and the instrument of our fear, the great Bad Mother, death. Because all of the great narratives are odysseys, travel, movement, discoveries, meetings, the schools of life and death. Road trips like Kerouac in Easy Rider; travels in the Hereafter like in the Divine Comedy of Dante; trips in the subconscious like in Proust, Joyce and Kafka; travels on foot like in Little Red Riding Hood and in picaresque novels; trips by horse as in Don Quixote and in the Western epics, and trips in space like those of Kubrick. Travels over water like in Homer, Conrad and Melville were the most emotional perhaps because the sea, the ocean and the great rivers contain a dark memory of the amniotic liquid from whence we come. Stories of ports and taverns, of ships and tempests, of a geography that is unstable and unfaithful, of people without a home and always on the move remind us that – on every page – security, solidity and eternity are just an illusion.
Because Ishmael and Achab are the same person, the beginning and the end.
They are us”.
author unknown, thanks anyway