Setting out to Sea
I read Adam Nicholson’s wonderful book on Homer years ago, in Cameroon. Recently I came upon this essay, ‘Sailing with the Greeks’, in The Plough. He remarks how Western thought has long unfolded in a terranian framework. It is has been on ‘a long campaign to establish “foundations” for what it does. No thought can be valid without some meaty “groundwork” having been laid. “Grounds” are where truth is thought to begin.’ What if, instead, we attuned our thinking to the sea? ‘When lying on a sofa or having lunch in a restaurant, nothing seems more obvious than our ability to choose. The menu of life encourages the illusion of potency and feeds the arrogance that comes in its wake. The boat is the opposite of that. It imposes a necessary modesty, a submission to the all too obvious reality of the defining situation around you. You can only do what the boat requires you to do. And in that compulsion, mysteriously, a sense of freedom flowers, one in which your life is momentarily liberated from the need to choose’.
