Out to Sea and Back With Swept Away

“Consider the subtleness of the sea,” wrote Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, “the devilish brilliance and beauty … the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth … Do not you find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti...