Nearly a year ago I accompanied my wife to a Cambridge bookstore. While she was trying to locate a book, I wandered absentmindedly through the bursting aisles. Thus I spotted a poster, hung awkwardly on a flimsy partition designed to streamline the long queue at the cashier, as well as to prevent an occasional malefactor from slipping past unnoticed. I knelt in front of the poster, to make sure that not a single detail would escape me: a dozen or so magnificent sailing boats rushed toward me, their crews busy and tense with excitement.

How beautiful, I thought. How true. The colorful spinnakers, the aluminum beams and masts, the transparent sails, the glittering objects strewn on the decks, the polyester hulls… Everything looked so fresh, so impermeable, so new, so perfect and ready to defeat the old blue ocean underneath and the invisible wind above. I concentrated upon the details of my dream: nothing of that glory was to be wasted. I concentrated upon the similarities, the colors and patterns of spinnakers notwithstanding. I concentrated upon the products, which, with some luck and cunning, I would be able to handle myself some day… The product trademarks came into the focus. The hulls, the sails, the equipment—everything was made by two or three manufacturers. And then my eyes overtook my thoughts. The similarities turned into identities. My eyes raced ahead. Even the crews bore the same stamp of universal competence and happiness. Their blond hairs, their blue eyes, and their tanned skins glimmered in unison, with determination and purpose of those who know few doubts.

I unexpectedly sprung to my feat. These are not boats, I exclaimed almost audibly. I looked around in embarrassment. These are not people, either. This picture is not true. My boat will be ugly and heavy and dark. My boat will be slow. My boat will be awkward. My boat will be true. The Mediterranean must not be insulted in this way. In the name of Thucydides, my boat will honor the past. It will be a boat, and not a thing.

Addendum (December 7, 1985)

There are two places in Cambridge where one can appreciate a number of extinct species of boats at one’s leisure: the Science Museum, where there is a small section replete with models of boats, including an exquisite trireme, and MIT, where one of the corridors on the first floor suddenly bulges out into a gallery with many models of boats and ships. Sometimes, while I stand in front of those toys with my hands tucked deep in my pockets, I can hear the roar of the sea and the cries of little men dashing about the decks and climbing atop heavy masts to see what awaits them ahead. My chest then swells with pride, and I find myself strutting importantly among the visitors, as though I was in some intimate way connected with that sea and those men. Soon enough I realize how ridiculous my position is. And that is why I visit these two places only by chance.