“Why
should she be in the bowels of a ship ploughing through sullen, turbulent
waters going to a foreign continent alone? Why? Why?” (Betsy and the Great World, M.H. Lovelace, p.20)
On my
last day in the office, my colleagues sent me off with a packet of “steamer
letters” with which to beguile the nausea aboard the Shanghai as it tossed and bobbed and rolled on the swells of a
winter Atlantic. We all know how that turned out—to date. I find their
inspiration compelling; and a more thoughtful, whimsical, literate, and
hopelessly well-intended (“go easy on the vodka”) crew cannot exist in a man’s
working life. But having read Letter #1, with the attached chapter of Betsy and the Great World as a sort of
framing device, I’ll defer reading further until I am circumstanced on a boat.
However tight, the confines of a 350-seat CanadaAir 777 cannot replicate the
queasy conditions of a steamer, especially on a voyage of only seven hours.
Sea-faring humanizes the traveler, makes a man aware of bodily functions.
It is
something godlike to fly. Having winged to Poland now three times previously,
and to Europe once before, I find its sublimity undiminished even as flight has
become familiar, reliable. Certain details change, of course, the particular
lintiness of the clouds, the snowiness of fields below like cracked bathroom
tile, almond bark, milky quadrilaterals. This trip, snow began to fall in
Toronto as we boarded, and the long, long wings required de-icing with a steam
cannon, a first for me. But otherwise, flight, sacramental in its beauties,
again uplifted, like a cathedral: the whole body, not just the eyes.
At some
point in the night, I flew over the Rickmer’s Shanghai.
Along
with Betsy and the Great World, en
route to Kraków, I finished, oh so appropriately, Czesław Miłosz’s Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition.
A subject and a student of totalitarianisms, Nazi and Communist—among other
self-definitions—Miłosz concludes his personal account with the following:
when
ambition counsels us to lift ourselves above simple moral rules guarded by the
poor of spirit, rather than choose them as our compass needle amid the
uncertainties of change, we stifle the only thing that can redeem our follies
and mistakes: love. (p. 300)
Good
terms on which to end a book and a flight. I’m in Kraków.
