Had she broached to, not one of them would
ever have reached the deck.
For forty minutes I stood there alone
at the wheel, in my grasp the wildly careering schooner and the
lives of twenty-two men. Once we were pooped. I saw it coming,
and, half-drowned, with tons of water crushing me, I checked the
schooner's rush to broach to. At the end of the hour, sweating and
played out, I was relieved. But I had done it! With my own hands I
had done my trick at the wheel and guided a hundred tons of wood and
iron through a few million tons of wind and waves.
My delight was in that I had done it - not in the fact that twenty-
two men knew I had done it. Within the year over half of them were
dead and gone, yet my pride in the thing performed was not
diminished by half. I am willing to confess, however, that I do
like a small audience. But it must be a very small audience,
composed of those who love me and whom I love. When I then
accomplish personal achievement, I have a feeling that I am
justifying their love for me. But this is quite apart from the
delight of the achievement itself. This delight is peculiarly my
own and does not depend upon witnesses. When I have done some such
thing, I am exalted. I glow all over. I am aware of a pride in
myself that is mine, and mine alone. It is organic. Every fibre of
me is thrilling with it. It is very natural. It is a mere matter
of satisfaction at adjustment to environment. It is success.
Life that lives is life successful, and success is the breath of its
nostrils. The achievement of a difficult feat is successful
adjustment to a sternly exacting environment. The more difficult
the feat, the greater the satisfaction at its accomplishment. Thus
it is with the man who leaps forward from the springboard, out over
the swimming pool, and with a backward half-revolution of the body,
enters the water head first. Once he leaves the springboard his
environment becomes immediately savage, and savage the penalty it
will exact should he fail and strike the water flat. Of course, the
man does not have to run the risk of the penalty. He could remain
on the bank in a sweet and placid environment of summer air,
sunshine, and stability. Only he is not made that way. In that
swift mid-air moment he lives as he could never live on the bank.
As for myself, I'd rather be that man than the fellows who sit on
the bank and watch him. That is why I am building the Snark. I am
so made. I like, that is all. The trip around the world means big
moments of living. Bear with me a moment and look at it. Here am
I, a little animal called a man - a bit of vitalized matter, one
hundred and sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, nerve, sinew,
bones, and brain, - all of it soft and tender, susceptible to hurt,
fallible, and frail. I strike a light back-handed blow on the nose
of an obstreperous horse, and a bone in my hand is broken. I put my
head under the water for five minutes, and I am drowned. I fall
twenty feet through the air, and I am smashed. I am a creature of
temperature. A few degrees one way, and my fingers and ears and
toes blacken and drop off. A few degrees the other way, and my skin
blisters and shrivels away from the raw, quivering flesh. A few
additional degrees either way, and the life and the light in me go
out. A drop of poison injected into my body from a snake, and I
cease to move - for ever I cease to move. A splinter of lead from a
rifle enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the eternal
blackness.
Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life - it is all I
am. About me are the great natural forces - colossal menaces, Titans
of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me
than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have
no concern at all for me. They do not know me. They are
unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and
tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal
waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies,
earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts
and seas that leap aboard the largest crafts that float, crushing
humans to pulp or licking them off into the sea and to death - and
these insensate monsters do not know that tiny sensitive creature,
all nerves and weaknesses, whom men call Jack London, and who
himself thinks he is all right and quite a superior being.
In the maze and chaos of the conflict of these vast and draughty
Titans, it is for me to thread my precarious way. The bit of life
that is I will exult over them. The bit of life that is I, in so
far as it succeeds in baffling them or in bitting them to its
service, will imagine that it is godlike. It is good to ride the
tempest and feel godlike. I dare to assert that for a finite speck
of pulsating jelly to feel godlike is a far more glorious feeling
than for a god to feel godlike.
Here is the sea, the wind, and the wave. Here are the seas, the
winds, and the waves of all the world. Here is ferocious
environment. And here is difficult adjustment, the achievement of
which is delight to the small quivering vanity that is I. I like.
I am so made. It is my own particular form of vanity, that is all.
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