In The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger recounts the last, fatal voyage of the Andrea Gail, a Gloucester, Massachusetts, fishing boat that went down off Nova Scotia in 1991. In many ways, they owe more to the genius of Henry Luce than to that of Melville. Two recent books follow in Melville's wake, offering accounts of life and death at sea that are really meditations on human nature, on how far we can defy the elements, and how much we can know of ourselves.īoth books are by journalists who write for popular magazines such as Outside and Sports Illustrated, and both reflect the influence of contemporary journalism on our literature. "Meditation and water are wedded forever," wrote Herman Melville in Moby Dick, suggesting that it is metaphysics as much as money or adventure that draws people to risk their lives at sea.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |