The Plover: a Novel
“The sun shone, the sea murmured gently, birds he had never seen circled curiously, and he sat in the stern reading and eating the last of his shriveled oranges, the pips like faded juicy leather. Old Ed gave a terrific speech sort of about ships, did he not? He flipped through his green volumes until he found Burke’s speech in Parliament after the Americans, sick of being bullied from afar, calmly ransacked the British ships Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Griffin, and he read it aloud to the fork-tail...ed terns sailing around the Plover like huge butterflies: You wish to condemn the accused without a hearing, shouted old Ed to his snarling countrymen, to punish indiscriminately the innocent with the guilty! You will thus irrevocably alienate their hearts.… They cannot, by such means, be made to bow to authority; on the contrary, you will find their obstinacy confirmed and their fury exasperated.… Rip it, Edmund my boy! No flies on old Ed! Exactly right too. Authority cannot be assumed, it must be earned, and earned by example, not by force; or authority could be conferred if you sailed alone, captain of the absent crew, the untenanted berth, the empty manifest; better that a man sail alone than that he sail in tumult and confusion, subject to the various winds of others; indeed men were islands, John Donne was an idiot, and the wise man owned up to this cold reality, shipping alone, leaning on no one, no one leaning on him, wary of shoals and reefs, disappointing no one, and proffering no false harbors to friend or lover.MoreLess
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