Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest. Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?
There is a similarly terrifying vision of a man fallen overboard, in Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables" (Book II, Ch. 8, "The Deep and the Dark"), published in 1862:
"His pathetic head is but a speck in the enormity of the waves. ... What a ghostly vision that retreating sail is! .... He was there only a moment ago ... He is in the monstrous waters. He has nothing underfoot any more but shifting and treacherousness. The billows torn and chopped by the wind surround him hideously, the heavings of the deep overwhelm him, all the watery raggedness thrashes round his head; a mob of waves spews over him, blurred openings half devour him. Every time he goes under he glimpses precipices filled with darkness, frightful alien vegetations seize him, bind his feet, draw him towards them. He feels that he is becoming the deep, he is part of the spume, the waves toss him from one to another, he drinks bitterness, the craven ocean is furiously intent on drowning him, hugeness toys with him as he perishes. It seems as if all this water were hatred.... There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human tribulations. But what can they do for him? They fly, sing and soar, while he draws his dying breath.... He feels simultaneously buried by those two infinities, the ocean and the sky: the one is a tomb, the other a shroud."
