Not A Book Review - Just a Paragraph

E. B. White, who wrote Charlotte's Web and, with Will Strunk, The Elements of Style, was an essayist for The New Yorker, and an avid sailor, our of New Rochelle, where ILENE is now, and Blue Hill Bay, in Maine, where we will be this summer.

My Book Group read a book of his essays this month and out popped this lovely nugget that should warm the hearts of sailors, especially cruising sailors.

"If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble. If it happens to be an auxiliary cruising boat, it is without question the most compact and ingenious arrangement for living ever devised by the restless mind of man -- a home that is stable without being stationary, shaped less like a box than a fish or a bird or a girl, and in which the homeowner can remove his daily affairs as far from shore as he has the nerve to take them, close-hauled or running free -- parlor, bedroom, and bath, suspended and alive."

The Sea And The Wind That Blows, Essays at 259-60

White was my age when this was written and was contemplating giving up the sea. It has to happen to everyone with the passing of time. But I'm thinking that I need not think such thoughts for at least several years; I pray for more years at sea.