They
think I am crazy. In return, I am sympathetic. It is a state of
mind familiar to me. We are all prone to think there is something
wrong with the mental processes of the man who disagrees with us.
The ultimate word is I LIKE. It lies beneath philosophy, and is
twined about the heart of life. When philosophy has maundered
ponderously for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the
individual says, in an instant, "I LIKE," and does something else,
and philosophy goes glimmering. It is I LIKE that makes the
drunkard drink and the martyr wear a hair shirt; that makes one man
a reveller and another man an anchorite; that makes one man pursue
fame, another gold, another love, and another God. Philosophy is
very often a man's way of explaining his own I LIKE.
But to return to the Snark, and why I, for one, want to journey in
her around the world. The things I like constitute my set of
values. The thing I like most of all is personal achievement - not
achievement for the world's applause, but achievement for my own
delight. It is the old "I did it! I did it! With my own hands I
did it!" But personal achievement, with me, must be concrete. I'd
rather win a water-fight in the swimming pool, or remain astride a
horse that is trying to get out from under me, than write the great
American novel. Each man to his liking. Some other fellow would
prefer writing the great American novel to winning the water-fight
or mastering the horse.
Possibly the proudest achievement of my life, my moment of highest
living, occurred when I was seventeen. I was in a three-masted
schooner off the coast of Japan. We were in a typhoon. All hands
had been on deck most of the night. I was called from my bunk at
seven in the morning to take the wheel. Not a stitch of canvas was
set. We were running before it under bare poles, yet the schooner
fairly tore along. The seas were all of an eighth of a mile apart,
and the wind snatched the whitecaps from their summits, filling.
The air so thick with driving spray that it was impossible to see
more than two waves at a time. The schooner was almost
unmanageable, rolling her rail under to starboard and to port,
veering and yawing anywhere between south-east and south-west, and
threatening, when the huge seas lifted under her quarter, to broach
to. Had she broached to, she would ultimately have been reported
lost with all hands and no tidings.
I took the wheel. The sailing-master watched me for a space. He
was afraid of my youth, feared that I lacked the strength and the
nerve. But when he saw me successfully wrestle the schooner through
several bouts, he went below to breakfast.
