“¿Comprendes ahora, Bulkington? ¿Puedes aceptar esa verdad que a todo mortal se le antoja intolerable, que todo pensamiento profundo y honrado no es sino el intrépido esfuerzo que hace el alma por mantener la libre independencia de su mar, mientras que los más fuertes vientos del cielo y la tierra conspiran para arrojarla contra una costa engañosa y servil?”

-Moby Dick, XXIII-

Es un capítulo muy corto, el XXIII, pero genial y que me ha recordado cosas que escribí hace tiempo (en V.O.)...

In the Making

The sailor is a solitary man. Silence, work, and prayer, although this last not always being religious according to orthodoxy, are routine activities. The sailor lives surrounded by a horizon, the horizon between sea and sky and between heaven and earth. The sailor is merely a spot in the midst of the immense ocean, yet the greatest creature of the universe.

The sailor (metaphorically speaking) can become either a real mystic or a complete imbecile. Navigation means facing the truth revealed in a whisper coming from the solitude of the sea. The truth that there is no Creator without Creation and there is no Creator without Creatures. The real sailors, even those who neither do know how to read or write, have reached this truth.

There is no navigation without a horizon. The horizon may disturb the peace of both creation and the creature when it discloses to the sailor the reality of poverty and the lives of the poor in Third World countries (e.g., Brazil). The horizon that announces a personal destiny may be frightening when it remains blurred and still unknown. It calls for courage, or faith, to be willing to cross to the other side. Paradoxically, the most difficult boundaries to cross on is precisely that which man has created: the destitution line, the ethnic line, the color line, the religious line, the I-Thou line, and so on so forth. However, despite religions, cultures or ethnicity, the horizon discloses the reality of the poor, the miserable, the destitute, the dweller on the margins, and the eternal inhabitant of the boundaries. In order to erase their presence, one must deny one’s self. When the horizon discloses and reveals the poor, man discovers his self as being alienated from the human family, where the restless self reaches the juncture of its existence and must decide whether or not to join a common destiny with humankind or estrange oneself from it.

Man becomes imprisoned in his own identity when he awakens to his status quo, both the haves and the have-nots identity becomes determined making it difficult to change. So it was for the pious young man in the gospel who, besides being fond of his riches, was fond of his religion. Man is fond of riches and religion, and both can get along well in his culture. Either the young missionary or the young sailor carries his cultural identity in the register of his memories…