The Cruise of the Snark | Page 5

fibre
of me is thrilling with it. It is very natural. It is a mere matter of
satisfaction at adjustment to environment. It is success.
Life that lives is life successful, and success is the breath of its nostrils.
The achievement of a difficult feat is successful adjustment to a sternly
exacting environment. The more difficult the feat, the greater the
satisfaction at its accomplishment. Thus it is with the man who leaps
forward from the springboard, out over the swimming pool, and with a
backward half-revolution of the body, enters the water head first. Once
he leaves the springboard his environment becomes immediately
savage, and savage the penalty it will exact should he fail and strike the
water flat. Of course, the man does not have to run the risk of the
penalty. He could remain on the bank in a sweet and placid
environment of summer air, sunshine, and stability. Only he is not
made that way. In that swift mid-air moment he lives as he could never
live on the bank.
As for myself, I'd rather be that man than the fellows who sit on the
bank and watch him. That is why I am building the Snark. I am so
made. I like, that is all. The trip around the world means big moments
of living. Bear with me a moment and look at it. Here am I, a little

animal called a man--a bit of vitalized matter, one hundred and
sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, nerve, sinew, bones, and
brain,--all of it soft and tender, susceptible to hurt, fallible, and frail. I
strike a light back-handed blow on the nose of an obstreperous horse,
and a bone in my hand is broken. I put my head under the water for five
minutes, and I am drowned. I fall twenty feet through the air, and I am
smashed. I am a creature of temperature. A few degrees one way, and
my fingers and ears and toes blacken and drop off. A few degrees the
other way, and my skin blisters and shrivels away from the raw,
quivering flesh. A few additional degrees either way, and the life and
the light in me go out. A drop of poison injected into my body from a
snake, and I cease to move--for ever I cease to move. A splinter of lead
from a rifle enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the eternal
blackness.
Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life--it is all I am. About
me are the great natural forces--colossal menaces, Titans of destruction,
unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me than I have for
the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have no concern at all for
me. They do not know me. They are unconscious, unmerciful, and
unmoral. They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning flashes and
cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal waves, undertows and waterspouts,
great whirls and sucks and eddies, earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs
that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts and seas that leap aboard the largest
crafts that float, crushing humans to pulp or licking them off into the
sea and to death--and these insensate monsters do not know that tiny
sensitive creature, all nerves and weaknesses, whom men call Jack
London, and who himself thinks he is all right and quite a superior
being.
In the maze and chaos of the conflict of these vast and draughty Titans,
it is for me to thread my precarious way. The bit of life that is I will
exult over them. The bit of life that is I, in so far as it succeeds in
baffling them or in bitting them to its service, will imagine that it is
godlike. It is good to ride the tempest and feel godlike. I dare to assert
that for a finite speck of pulsating jelly to feel godlike is a far more
glorious feeling than for a god to feel godlike.

Here is the sea, the wind, and the wave. Here are the seas, the winds,
and the waves of all the world. Here is ferocious environment. And
here is difficult adjustment, the achievement of which is delight to the
small quivering vanity that is I. I like. I am so made. It is my own
particular form of vanity, that is all.
There is also another side to the voyage of the Snark. Being alive, I
want to see, and all the world is a bigger thing to see than one small
town or valley. We have done little outlining of the voyage. Only one
thing is definite, and that is that our first port of call will be Honolulu.
Beyond a few general ideas, we have no thought of our next port after
Hawaii. We shall make up our