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closer, perhaps, than if they had been lovers.
for if Bonaparte can assemble a superior force in the Channel, even for a little while, then his invasion army can come across, God forbid.
Sophia was not wholly persuaded that Jack at sea and Jack ashore were two different persons.
It was odd how one’s eye must take in and store innumerable measurements and proportions; a back was almost as recognisable as a face.
This applied also to gait, stance, lift of head: what countless references at every turn!
there is no hope of marriage without his estate is cleared and he can make at least some kind of settlement upon her.
admirable example, of the Whiggish state of mind at its best; and Jack was a Tory. He admired her, but it was with a detached admiration, as though he were in charge of a brother-officer’s wife, an elegant, chaste, unimaginative woman, running her life on scientific principles.
his navigation had been a plain rule-of-thumb progress from A to B, plane-sailing at its plainest;
Yet it was envy, too: they had a ship, they were part of a tightly-knit community.
They had a ship and he had not.
fine definitions fled dow...
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the two hundred and sixtieth a hermit:
No consolation in philosophy.
That is why I mean to read your letters; if you have nothing to be ashamed of, why should you object?
this young person was far, far too beautiful to be described as company, alone in a gentleman’s bedroom.
There’s many a true word spoken in jest.’
words and feathers are carried off by the wind; as is the wedding, so is the cake;
‘Naval custom is holy at sea, Mr Atkins,’
As a man he felt for the Marines broiling there; as a captain he left them to their motionless
this eye pierced straight through his post-captain’s epaulette and did not think much of what it saw below, was not deceived by the pomp.
when even this promotion was found to be not of the present world, they abandoned him altogether in favour of reflections upon their dinner,
‘It is a great comfort to me to have you aboard: it is like sailing with a piece of the True Cross.’
He had often tried to eradicate Jack’s simple faith; but Jack had seen him trepan the gunner of the Sophie, saw a hole in his skull and expose the brain; and Stephen, looking at Jack’s knowing smile, his air of civil reserve, knew that he had not succeeded this time, either.
there must be the far rarer quality of resisting the effects, the dehumanising effects, of the exercise of authority.
do you not find that a spoken language wafts in and out of your mind, leaving little trace unless you anchor it with print?’
‘This is a paradise,’ cried Stephen.
‘But at least,’ said Babbington, ‘we did fill our water-casks.
‘I could not have done that before I was broiled alive, desiccated, mummified: bless the sun in his power.’
‘You are hag-ridden by custom, in the Navy,’
fleeting away unused. Broad
I love that much of the narration is vaguely the perspective of the ship itself / the crew as a whole.
a particular living, supple command of the sea that he would have recognised at once, if he had been set down upon her deck blindfolded.
Jack knows his ship like a she’s a wife.
‘Jack, you have debauched my sloth.’
every man was a bachelor once he was beyond Gibraltar;
‘Sea-water and distance wash love away’;
it obliterated even time, so that it seemed normal to all hands that they should travel endlessly over this infinite and wholly empty sea, watching the sun diminish and the moon increase.
in any case the frigate’s tearing pace, the shrill song of her rigging, her noble running lift and plunge filled him with delight, a vivid ecstasy that he imagined to be private but that shone
completely identified with the ship.
his heart hurt him for the staysail, for the ship – an edge of sentiment and self-pity, with Sophia’s name hovering on the edge of utterance aloud.
An albatross broad on the starboard beam.
Bow, bow to predestination or at least confine yourself to silent prayer.’
Stephen accepts the inevitable and the cold hard truth; Jack has faith and pushes forward even when foolish.
On and on she sailed, in warmer seas but void, as though they alone had survived Deucalion’s flood; as though all land had vanished from the earth; and once again the ship’s routine dislocated time and temporal reality so that this progress was an endless dream, even a circular dream, contained within an unbroken horizon and punctuated only by the sound of guns thundering daily in preparation for an enemy whose real existence it was impossible to conceive.
Reaching the West Indies was never really their purpose, and now they had none.
he had the impression of living in a vacuum.
moving urgently along, surrounded by its own vacuum; each man bombinating in his own, no doubt. My journal, re-read but yesterday,
‘The seas their wonders might reveal
But Chloe’s eyes have more: Nor all the treasure they conceal, Can equal mine on shore.’
Dream: that was the point. Little contact with reality, perhaps – a child of hope – a potentiality – infinitely better left unrealised.
Against hope?
he had welcomed what he called his liberation from her:
the unreasoning part of his mind evoked living images of these same charms, of that incredible grace of movement when it was truly spontaneous;
Passion vs reason
an unchastity odious in another woman had what he could only call a purity in her: another purity: pagan, obviously – a purity from another code altogether.
But Lord, the infinite possibilities of self-deception – the difficulty of disentangling the countless strands of emotion and calling each by its proper name – of separating business from pleasure. At times, whatever he might say, he was surely lost in a cloud of unknowing; but at least it was a peaceful cloud at present and sailing through a milky sea towards a possible though unlikely ecstasy at an indefinite remove was, if not the fulness of life, then something like its shadow.
