IIs this the greatest
opening passage in literature or what?
"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never
mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing
particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would
sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have
of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find
myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November
in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin
warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially
whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong
moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and
methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get
to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With
a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to
the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all
men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings
towards the ocean with me. "
Herman Melville, Moby
Dick
Ahab to his Quadrant
Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals,
and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might;
but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself
happenest to be on this wide planet and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more!
Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon;
and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science!
Herman Melville, Moby
Dick
Sextant:
an entertaining, albeit
expensive, device, which, together with a good atlas, is of use in introducing
the boatman to many interesting areas on the earth's surface which he and his
craft are not within 1,000 nautical miles of.
Beard and
McKie, Sailing: The
Fine Art of Getting Wet and Becoming Ill While Slowly Going Nowhere at Great
Expense
With the sextant he made obeisance to the sun-god, he consulted
ancient tomes and tables of magic characters, muttered prayers in a
strange tongue that sounded like Indexerrorparallaxrefraction,
made cabalistic signs on paper, added and carried one, and then, on a
piece of holy script called the Grail - I mean, the Chart - he placed
his finger on a certain space conspicuous for its blankness and said, "Here we
are." When we looked at the blank space and asked, "And
where is that?" he answered in the cipher-code of the higher
priesthood, "31 -15 - 47 north, 133 - 5 - 30 west." And we said,
"Oh," and felt mighty small.
Jack London, The Cruise of the Snark
The difference between the sun's
position and the position where the sun ought to be if it were a decent,
self-respecting sun is called the Equation of Time.
Jack London, The Cruise of the Snark
The Snark sailed from Fiji on Saturday, June 6, and the
next day, Sunday, on the wide ocean, out of sight of land, I proceeded to
endeavour to find out my position by a chronometer sight for longitude and by a
meridian sight for latitude. The chronometer sight was taken in the morning,
when the sun was some 21 degrees above the horizon. I looked in the Nautical
Almanac and found that on that very day, June 7, the sun was behind time 1
minute and 26 seconds, and that it was catching up at a rate of 14/67 seconds
per hour. The chronometer said that at the precise moment of taking the sun's
altitude it was 25 minutes after 8:00 in Greenwich. From this date it would seem
a schoolboy's task to correct the Equation of Time. Unfortunately I was not a
schoolboy.
Jack London, The Cruise of the Snark
Let me not to the marriage
of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds,
Nor bends with the remover to remove.
Oh, no, it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ nor no man ever loved.
Shakespeare,
Sonnet 116
Joseph Conrad on death...
…I observed his weary eyes gaze steadily ahead, as if there had
been nothing between him and the straight line of the sea and sky,
where whatever a seaman is looking for is first bound to appear. But
I have also seen his eyes rest fondly upon the faces in the room, upon
the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that home,
whose abiding and clear image must have flashed often on his memory in
times of stress and anxiety at sea. Was he looking out for a strange
Landfall, or taking with untroubled mind the bearings for his last
Departure? It is hard to say; for in that voyage from which no man
returns Landfall and Departure are instantaneous, merging together in
one moment of supreme and final attention.
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the
Sea
This one's on flight, but the same idea
applies to those who only know electronic navigation....
One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks,
the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one
day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten
how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are
carefully promoted to a familiarity with labeled buttons, and in whose
minds the knowledge the sky and the wind and the way of the weather will
be as extraneous as passing fiction.
Beryl Markham, West with the Night
Why electronics will never be enough....
The new ship here is fitted according to the reported increase of
knowledge among mankind. Namely, she is cumbered end to end, with bells
and trumpets and clock and wires, it has been told to me, can call voices
out of the air of the waters to con the ship while her crew sleep. But
sleep thou lightly. It has not yet been told to me that the Sea has
ceased to be the Sea.
Rudyard Kipling
Here is John Milton writing on the obliquity of
the earth's axis:
Some say, he bid his angels turn
askance
The poles of earth twice ten degrees or more
From
the sun's axle; they with labour push'd
Oblique the
centric globe: some say, the sun
Was bid turn reins from th' equinoctial road
Like distant breadth to
Taurus with the seven
Atlantic Sisters, and the Spartan
Twins,
Up to the Tropic Crab; thence down amain
By
Leo, and the Virgin, and the Scales,
As deep as
Capricorn, to bring in change
Of seasons to each clime.
"Paradise
Lost"
Charles Kingsley on the constellation
Andromeda:
I
set thee
High for a star in the heavens, a sign and hope
for the seamen.
"Andromeda"
The wind has shifted; now it blows across
our path and rises from the black west, now
the air has thickened into mist. We
cannot
hold out against it, cannot keep on course.
Since Fortune has the better of us now,
Let us obey and turn aside where she
has called. I think the faithful shores of Eryx,
your brother, and Sicilian ports are not
far off, if only I remember right
and can retrace the stars I watched
before.
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. by Allen
Mandelbaum
St. Paul before his shipwreck:
But soon a tempestuous wind, called the
northeaster, struck down from the land; and when the ship was caught and could
not face the wind, we gave way to to it and were driven....As we were violently
storm-tossed, they began the next day to throw the cargo overboard; and the
third day they cast out with their own hands the tackle of the ship. And when
neither sun nor stars appeared for many a day, and no small tempest lay on us,
all hope of our being saved was at last abandoned.
Acts of the Apostle, Ch. 27:14-20, Revised
Standard Version
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
Walt Whitman
Kenneth Grahame asks the pertinent question:
" This has been a wonderful day!" said he, as the Rat shoved off and took to the
sculls again. "Do you know, I've never been in a boat before in all my
life."
"What?" cried the Rat, open-mouthed.
"Never been in a -- you never -- well I -- what have you been doing, then?"
The Wind in the Willows
" Is it so nice as all that?" asked the Mole shyly....
"Nice? It's the only
thing," the Water Rat said
solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. "Believe me, my young friend,
there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply
messing about in boats. Simply messing," he went on dreamily: "messing --
about -- in -- boats."
The Wind in the Willows
Just had to throw these in
because I have so many occasions to observe their truth!
"You ain't
gonna learn what you don't want to know."
The Grateful
Dead
"In the face of
stupidity, the gods themselves are helpless."
Unknown, but my
mother quoted it often!
