Chapter 2
659 Words
Next day there was a calm, which added not a little to my impatience
of the ship. And, furthermore, by certain nameless associations
revived in me my old impressions upon first witnessing as a landsman
this phenomenon of the sea. Those impressions may merit a page.
To a landsman a calm is no joke. It not only revolutionizes his
abdomen, but unsettles his mind; tempts him to recant his belief in
the eternal fitness of things; in short, almost makes an infidel of
him.
At first he is taken by surprise, never having dreamt of a state of
existence where existence itself seems suspended. He shakes himself
in his coat, to see whether it be empty or no. He closes his eyes, to
test the reality of the glassy expanse. He fetches a deep breath, by
way of experiment, and for the sake of witnessing the effect. If a
reader of books, Priestley on Necessity occurs to him; and he
believes in that old Sir Anthony Absolute to the very last chapter.
His faith in Malte Brun, however, begins to fail; for the geography,
which from boyhood he had implicitly confided in, always assured him,
that though expatiating all over the globe, the sea was at least
margined by land. That over against America, for example, was Asia.
But it is a calm, and he grows madly skeptical.
To his alarmed fancy, parallels and meridians become emphatically
what they are merely designated as being: imaginary lines drawn round
the earth's surface.
The log assures him that he is in such a place; but the log is
a liar; for no place, nor any thing possessed of a local angularity,
is to be lighted upon in the watery waste.
At length horrible doubts overtake him as to the captain's competency
to navigate his ship. The ignoramus must have lost his way, and
drifted into the outer confines of creation, the region of the
everlasting lull, introductory to a positive vacuity.
Thoughts of eternity thicken. He begins to feel anxious concerning
his soul.
The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange
and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big
for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming
in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of
reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering
galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the
man in the bass drum.
But more than all else is the consciousness of his utter
helplessness. Succor or sympathy there is none. Penitence for
embarking avails not. The final satisfaction of despairing may not be
his with a relish. Vain the idea of idling out the calm. He may sleep
if he can, or purposely delude himself into a crazy fancy, that he is
merely at leisure. All this he may compass; but he may not lounge;
for to lounge is to be idle; to be idle implies an absence of any
thing to do; whereas there is a calm to be endured: enough to attend
to, Heaven knows.
His physical organization, obviously intended for locomotion, becomes
a fixture; for where the calm leaves him, there he remains. Even his
undoubted vested rights, comprised in his glorious liberty of
volition, become as naught. For of what use? He wills to go: to get
away from the calm: as ashore he would avoid the plague. But he can
not; and how foolish to revolve expedients. It is more hopeless than
a bad marriage in a land where there is no Doctors' Commons. He has
taken the ship to wife, for better or for worse, for calm or
for gale; and she is not to be shuffled off. With yards akimbo, she
says unto him scornfully, as the old beldam said to the little
dwarf:--"Help yourself"
And all this, and more than this, is a calm.
- Writer
