Prologue
My name is Arthur Alexander. I am thirty four years old. Until three months ago, I was a familiar, if unexciting, figure often seen around the financial district of Boston, Massachusetts. I had an office on the thirty-eighth floor of a building surrounded by other buildings. For eleven years I have worked in the accounting department. I had always preferred things to be orderly, and, when the time came, I chose a line of work which would grant me that. Others in the department found it necessary to exhibit their rebellions against the firm reality of numbers by dreaming up means by which they might divert whole slabs of money into their own coffers, but I never went along with their silly schemes. Not that any of them actually attempted such a thing, no. Instead, they spoke loudly and braggingly of what they were going to do someday. I-allow me to assure you of this-was never very interested in "someday." My life was small, perhaps, and yet I have searched my memory for any hints of dissatisfaction, and I have found none. I had an apartment on Beacon Hill where I kept my books and my music. I had a small circle of friends-or perhaps I ought to call them acquaintances: I have been learning something about friendship recently-with whom I dined infrequently and with whom I discussed fine points of aesthetics. We prided ourselves on our taste and our decorum. I might even be tempted to accuse us of making a fetish of decency. I have an image of myself which is not especially flattering, I suppose, but which does accurately symbolize my way of living back there in Boston. Picture for yourself an ordinary looking man with sandy hair and a long face sitting before a small fire of birch logs. The apartment around him is quiet. Nothing disturbs his repose. Beside him is a glass of deep red wine, about which he is more keenly aware that it is from the eight-year-old bottle of St. Emilion he has been hording than he is of its taste. He raises the glass to his nose, swirling the wine gently as he does so. He inhales the fragrance. He holds the glass toward the fire to watch the play of light through the wine. Satisfied, he raises it once more to his lips and rolls a small portion onto his tongue. He savors the taste. He swallows. And then-and this is what characterizes him-he turns his face slightly so that he is watching his own eyes in the mirror behind a spray of cyclamen, and he smiles at himself a vain smile. I was; I'm afraid to say, rather a tiresome fellow.
I was not aware of the fact then, but this carefully constructed and assiduously maintained ambiance was far and away less stable than I ever dreamed. It has taken a mere three months to vitiate completely the habits of eleven years. This book is an attempt to report the true events of those three months, mostly, I confess, for my own sake. I am still stunned by the quickness of it all. I must say, I would not cavil if you chose to regard this as a fiction. Indeed, were it not for the sun shining so strongly on my head this very minute, or for the wind, or indeed for the thrilling blue of the sea, I might well believe myself that I had made all this up. The whole thing is so like a fantasy, after all, that I might have dreamed it. Perhaps-I think this less now than I , used to, but it does still occur-perhaps I will wake up and find myself back there in front of that sterile fire, amusing myself with a lonely bottle of good wine, having drunk too much and slept. I despise the idea of such a thing so intensely that I have been having trouble sleeping right here. Often I rise and climb up to look at the stars, standing barefooted on the dew-covered deck, and I marvel that they are the same stars which may be seen from Boston. Well, from somewhere outside Boston. I think of the people, those acquaintances, whom I have left behind. I bend my mind upon the office. I do miss the gossip: that's a genuine feeling, although I never took part in the gossiping that seemed to qualify in everyone's mind for work. I do miss the little stories, the small questions-does she, or doesn't she?-which I used to hear. But they do not make me homesick. How could such a paltry satisfaction hold sway over the attraction of this wide sea, the stars? How, also, could the memory of my few relationships-what a constipated word for love I-with the receptionists or the secretaries attract me away from Marianne? I like a woman to have something to say. That was the trouble with the office girls: their slender bodies matched perfectly their inadequate minds. But Marianne! Firm, strong, womanly are the words that come to mind. Her voluptuous form mirrors a rich mind, a burning inquisitiveness, such an aggression as would have shocked me before. I would have run from her. I would have run until I was in no danger from her and then turned around and sneered. How stupid we are! Thank God she came when she did. To choose death, or, to be less melodramatic, to choose blandness when one might have vigor: such is the stupidity of those legions upon legions, of men, the mawkish, the dun, of whom I was once one.
Perhaps I should set the scene. It is early April. Marianne and I are living aboard her thirty-six foot sailboat, Moth, while we shake her down and stock her up for a run across the mid-Atlantic to the Caribbean. Moth is a cutter, double-ended, something rather like an old Colin Archer design. She was built eighteen years ago in Denmark, but she has lived in the Mediterranean for the past ten. Her hull is of wood and has been well maintained, her mast is Norway spruce, her mainsail is new, and over the past four days we have been installing a home-made self-steering rig. Such technical details will not be of interest to my general readers, but I have found a great satisfaction in accustoming myself to the jargon of nautical life. There is that about the precision of Moth's performance which sits well with a mind attracted to orderliness, and the endless technological details of the rigging, the stowage, the engine repairs, the ground tackle well, everything really-is an undiminishing fascination to me.
We are in Greek waters. Once the funeral and all its attendant details were over, we left Istanbul, and we lie now in the Piraeus. In two days we leave for a week's cruise around the near islands, a last attempt to get everything cleared away before the beginning of the voyage. The winds have not been particularly good-it will not surprise me again that the Greeks invented the bireme with its rows of oars rather than the caravel-but Marianne and I are not in any hurry. Everything has been done, and that which we were unable to do simply has been left behind. (I say that so cavalierly, and yet only three months ago the idea of leaving any string untied would have been anathema. Well, the idea of doing this at all never would have occurred to me then.)
Greece! I, Arthur Alexander, right this very instant, am looking across the dirty, dark waters of the Piraeus at Greece! Three months ago, Greece was Homer, retsina, and shepherds on the sides of Olympus. Greece was mythic, then, and now she is real. Oh, the myth was perfectly real as well, I imagine, but ... well, just look around me! I hear the valuable voices of the watermen, the thumping of engines. A Japanese freighter which came in last night is pumping her bilge and clearing away her gear so she can discharge. Two tugs are passing. The water roils brown in their wakes. Our topsides are becoming streaked with oil. The skyline is jumbled, unplanned, getting along as best it can. The sun is hot. The day is still. There is a hard glitter everywhere, a brassiness about the horizon, which, they say, portends a wind. Marianne is ashore with the dingy, seeing about some boson's stores, and I am left, having finished my job of hand-stitching the boltropes and the cringles of the new mainsail to jot down here a few thoughts in the sun. How proud I felt, sitting on the doghouse with my palm and beeswax and the dun-colored sail spread out around me! One of the voyaging crowd, I felt one of those rootless people whose lives are spent being blown forever over another horizon. Beyond and beyond, for day after day, month after month, following the lead of the wind. The sun beats on my arms and shoulders. My skin, which had been red, turns slowly to brown. I sport a mustache for the first time in my life, and it becomes quite a walrus. My hair begins to curl around my ears. I Bit, and sew, and the crews of the barges, the pilots, the tugs look at me with envy on their faces. Yachtsmen burbling past in their weekend-shiny Clorox-bottle yachts see the sturdy lines and the heavy gear, and they know I am different from them. I am one of those albatrosses, they think, who float on their wide wings above the tops of the long, grey swells of the southern ocean, around and around and around the world, never stopping, never seeing any land, never bothering with anything save the wind, and the waves, and the sea.
I would never have suspected such romanticism in myself. My history has been one of small pleasures, small thoughts. The great oceans of the world have meant little or nothing to me. Awe itself has played but a marginal role in my life. It is through Marianne that such things becomes possible for me. I must, I suppose, have had an incipient leaning toward the magnificent. Maybe we all do. But it took the discovery of Marianne-a chance occurrence-for me suddenly to realize just how much I had been missing in my former life. The explosion came through sex, yes, but I am not so much a voluptuary as a pilgrim. I feel that I am just now beginning with my life, that I have taken the first steps along a path which I hope will never to come to an end. I am looking for experience. I am not striving in what is a demonic way, however, for the experiences themselves are of little value. It is the manner in which they enlarge my own capacities that makes them valuable to me. I can, for example, say that sex with Marianne is a. holy experience, but it is made so not through its heavenly quality-which it does have, of course-but through its love. Love, at least like this, is something I have never felt before. I am transformed. Ideas occur to me, capabilities become apparent, that have never even entered my life. I recall that as we sailed finally into the Aegean from the Sea of Marmora, after we had gotten clear of the shipping and were coasting along the hillsides which Alexander once knew, Marianne, who was at the tiller, turned to me and said that life cruising, the sun and the sea, were essential for existence. This was no revelation to her. This was a statement of simple fact. Life without these things was nothing. Now, it had never occurred to me that such importance could be placed on these things. I had sometimes enjoyed a short summer's sail around Boston Harbor or off Cape Cod, but what I had thought of as the essential realities of life, the getting and spending, so overshadowed these vacation moments that they were in my memory like the faded photographs which gathered dust while recording them. But, with Marianne, these things have become essential to me as well. I understand now that my former life was one of meekness almost unheard of. I was no man then. I had no force. My greatest ability was to lie over on my back and be trodden upon by everyone who came my way. An entirely new conception of manhood is becoming available to me, one which grows out of Marianne's intense femininity and out of the life which we have begun together. All the old qualities-strength, decision, courage which we men have so easily learned to vilify are becoming the cornerstones of Arthur Alexander's new manhood. Where I am strong, Marianne is weak, and vice versa. We reveal in our difference, not in our similarity. There is no unisex style aboard this ship, thank you very much. I am a man, and she is a woman. I have no desire to grow a cunt, nor does she pine for the day she may sport a cock. I go out, she goes in: the difference is important as well as profound.
But I see her rowing out toward me now, threading her way through the other yachts which have taken shelter here in the navel of Greece. We'll be leaving soon on a short trip, and then on a longer one. Perhaps we'll never return to the Piraeus. Civilization began here, at least for we Westerners. Or in Egypt, or Mesopotamia. I'll see Alexandria before I die, and the ruins of Nineveh. Civilization began beside this hot, still sea: our stem when we are sailing cuts through the furrows left by Darius, Xerxes, Alexander, Caesar. The sea is crossed, and scarred, and checkered, and hatched. Civilization began here, and so do I.