"That restlessness lay open-faced before me. With the sea there was no secret longing for change, for at no moment did it even pretend to hold still. Why did people speak of the eternal sea? An unwanted answer rose up from my own depths: perhaps because all her heaving and signing were endlessly futile." Ahab's Wife or, the Star-Gazer This week I've been weathering the storm with Una--Captain Ahab's wife, who much like me, is a skeptic and therefore, naturally, a star-gazer. It just so happens that the sky outside had been a Nantucket gray for the past few days and I feel myself absorb, both body and mind, into Una's life on a New England Island by the sea. And when that Island grows small, and she escapes to life on the sea disguising herself as a cabin boy for a whaling ship heading to the Pacific, I breathe easier and feel that I too have broken loose from the definition of a life I have prescribed for myself. Strangely, when my sorrow spills over i...
