The Cruise of the Snark | Page 4

everybody else's line
of least resistance. They make of their own bundle of desires, likes, and
dislikes a yardstick wherewith to measure the desires, likes, and
dislikes of all creatures. This is unfair. I tell them so. But they cannot
get away from their own miserable egos long enough to hear me. They
think I am crazy. In return, I am sympathetic. It is a state of mind
familiar to me. We are all prone to think there is something wrong with
the mental processes of the man who disagrees with us.
The ultimate word is I LIKE. It lies beneath philosophy, and is twined
about the heart of life. When philosophy has maundered ponderously
for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the individual says,
in an instant, "I LIKE," and does something else, and philosophy goes
glimmering. It is I LIKE that makes the drunkard drink and the martyr
wear a hair shirt; that makes one man a reveller and another man an
anchorite; that makes one man pursue fame, another gold, another love,
and another God. Philosophy is very often a man's way of explaining

his own I LIKE.
But to return to the Snark, and why I, for one, want to journey in her
around the world. The things I like constitute my set of values. The
thing I like most of all is personal achievement--not achievement for
the world's applause, but achievement for my own delight. It is the old
"I did it! I did it! With my own hands I did it!" But personal
achievement, with me, must be concrete. I'd rather win a water-fight in
the swimming pool, or remain astride a horse that is trying to get out
from under me, than write the great American novel. Each man to his
liking. Some other fellow would prefer writing the great American
novel to winning the water-fight or mastering the horse.
Possibly the proudest achievement of my life, my moment of highest
living, occurred when I was seventeen. I was in a three-masted
schooner off the coast of Japan. We were in a typhoon. All hands had
been on deck most of the night. I was called from my bunk at seven in
the morning to take the wheel. Not a stitch of canvas was set. We were
running before it under bare poles, yet the schooner fairly tore along.
The seas were all of an eighth of a mile apart, and the wind snatched
the whitecaps from their summits, filling. The air so thick with driving
spray that it was impossible to see more than two waves at a time. The
schooner was almost unmanageable, rolling her rail under to starboard
and to port, veering and yawing anywhere between south-east and
south-west, and threatening, when the huge seas lifted under her quarter,
to broach to. Had she broached to, she would ultimately have been
reported lost with all hands and no tidings.
I took the wheel. The sailing-master watched me for a space. He was
afraid of my youth, feared that I lacked the strength and the nerve. But
when he saw me successfully wrestle the schooner through several
bouts, he went below to breakfast. Fore and aft, all hands were below at
breakfast. Had she broached to, not one of them would ever have
reached the deck. For forty minutes I stood there alone at the wheel, in
my grasp the wildly careering schooner and the lives of twenty-two
men. Once we were pooped. I saw it coming, and, half-drowned, with
tons of water crushing me, I checked the schooner's rush to broach to.

At the end of the hour, sweating and played out, I was relieved. But I
had done it! With my own hands I had done my trick at the wheel and
guided a hundred tons of wood and iron through a few million tons of
wind and waves.
My delight was in that I had done it--not in the fact that twenty- two
men knew I had done it. Within the year over half of them were dead
and gone, yet my pride in the thing performed was not diminished by
half. I am willing to confess, however, that I do like a small audience.
But it must be a very small audience, composed of those who love me
and whom I love. When I then accomplish personal achievement, I
have a feeling that I am justifying their love for me. But this is quite
apart from the delight of the achievement itself. This delight is
peculiarly my own and does not depend upon witnesses. When I have
done some such thing, I am exalted. I glow all over. I am aware of a
pride in myself that is mine, and mine alone. It is organic. Every