Maritime Motivational Quotes

Any port in a storm.

Returning briefly to my novel and my sense that Jonathan might not survive its ending, I'm reminded of some thoughts I had regarding Howard's masterly story "Dagon". At the story's end we find its by-now crazed narrator cowering in his rented San Francisco room and planning an impending suicide that will deliver him from the appalling world of madness and delusion into which his maritime experience has plunged him. On first reading, I perhaps thought this a touch over-dramatic and sensational, although upon turning it over in my mind I realise that it's a wonderful counter-example of the problems I have previously noted in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Whereas in Stoker's book the final affirmation of conventionality and human values tends to undermine the very horror Stoker has so masterfully achieved in the preceding pages, Lovecraft's tale shows a reaction to the supernatural or super-normal (something which is by its very nature utterly incomprehensible) that is a lot more credible in terms of our human psychology: when faced with something which we know should not exist and for which we have neither name nor concept, we do not concoct an ingenious opposing strategy nor rally our defences. Rather, we go mad and kill ourselves. Although this is a bleak and pessimistic ending to a tale, it seems to me that in the realm of alien literary horrors that we are discussing, it is a far more believable and honest one. I somehow don't believe that the adventure mode of storytelling with its reassuring strictures and conventions (fearless heroes ultimately triumphing against some poorly-motivated adversary or other unlikely hazard) is appropriate to the variety of strange tale that I wish to tell.

All maritime nations have vital interests beyond their borders. All maritime nations, then, to the extent that they project power over an international commons, are empires. But the degree of that projection, its character and the actual motives animating it, matter. The United States was an empire not for the purpose of subjugation or exploitation, but for the aspiration of advancing the expressly articulated ideals of the United Nations, the Atlantic Charter, and NATO: namely, the right of nations to stand free from outside coercion or subversion of peoples to chart their own destiny.