I used a quote from Patrick O’Brian’s Post Captain to start my letter, “No urge to be doing”:

“There are days… when one sees as though one had been blind the rest of one’s life. Such clarity – perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good. However… doing of some kind there must be.”

I am still in the kind of emotional and spiritual fallout that happens after I release a book, well-described by bell hooks in Teaching To Transgress:

Whenever I finish a work, I always feel lost, as though a steady anchor has been taken away and there is no sure ground under my feet. During the time between ending one project and beginning another, I always have a crisis of meaning. I begin to wonder what my life is all about and what I have been put on this earth to do. It is as though immersed in a project I lose all sense of myself and must then, when the work is done, rediscover who I am and where I am going.

It’s funny that hooks refers to an “anchor” because one of the recurring themes in O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series is how much a sailor doesn’t know what to do with himself when he’s on land.

Hence the beginning of the greatest seafaring novel, Moby-Dick:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”

I’m not quite there, I’m still enjoying my shore leave, so to speak, but it won’t be long until it’ll be time to get out to sea again.