| May 6th, 2008 |
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a ship of the line
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06:07 am
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This description in Les Mis was beautiful, and as I read it, I thought about ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sovay's recent entries, and also about teenybuffalo, who's helping to organize "Sail into the Sunset 2008" (more information in her entry here) and who loves the sea.
"A vessel of the line is composed at once of the heaviest and lightest materials, because it has to contend simultaneously with the three forms of matter, the solid, the liquid, and the fluid. She has eleven iron claws to grasp the rock at the bottom of the sea, and more wings and feelers than a butterfly to catch the breezes in the sky. Her breath is expelled through her hundred and twenty guns as through enormous trumpets, and proudly answers the thunderbolt. The ocean strives to lead it astray in the frightful similarity of its billows, but the ship has a compass, its soul, always counseling it and always pointing toward the north. On dark nights, the lantern takes the place of the stars. So, to oppose the wind, it has ropes and canvas; against the water its timbers; against the rock its iron, copper, and lead; against the darkness, light; against immensity, a needle."
That's from the Signet Classics edition of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo ("new unabridged translation by Lee Fabnestock and Norman MacAfee, based on the classic C. E. Wilbour translation," so they say, and Signet is an imprint of the American Library which is somehow part of Penguin, and this edition was published in 1987), pp 369-70.I feel...:  cheerful I hear...: birdsong |
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