remain hard as ever, hiding his ecstasy, and he remarks gruffly,
off-handedly, that he guesses he can play over a few records. And so,
every other evening, we watch this killer and driver, with lacerated
knuckles and gorilla paws, brushing and caressing his beloved discs,
ravished with the music of them, and, as he told me early in the voyage,
at such moments believing in God.

A strange experience is this life on the Elsinore. I confess, while it
seems that I have been here for long months, so familiar am I with every
detail of the little round of living, that I cannot orient myself. My
mind continually strays from things non-understandable to things
incomprehensible--from our Samurai captain with the exquisite Gabriel
voice that is heard only in the tumult and thunder of storm; on to the
ill-treated and feeble-minded faun with the bright, liquid, pain-filled
eyes; to the three gangsters who rule the forecastle and seduce the
second mate; to the perpetually muttering O'Sullivan in the steel-walled
hole and the complaining Davis nursing the marlin-spike in the upper
bunk; and to Christian Jespersen somewhere adrift in this vastitude of
ocean with a coal-sack at his feet. At such moments all the life on the
_Elsinore_ becomes as unreal as life to the philosopher is unreal.

I am a philosopher. Therefore, it is unreal to me. But is it unreal to
Messrs. Pike and Mellaire? to the lunatics and idiots? to the rest of
the stupid herd for'ard? I cannot help remembering a remark of De
Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: "The profoundest
instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real.
He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion.
Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and
myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the
privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake,
has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man,
awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable,
Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he
makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."

Ben will agree that I have quoted him fairly. And so, the thought comes
to me, that to all these slaves of the _Elsinore_ the Real is real
because they fictionally escape it. One and all they are obsessed with
the belief that they are free agents. To me the Real is unrea