WWII Soldiers Stranded At Sea (Unbroken by Hillenbrand) |
Of all the details that pour through the story, the voyage upon military issued rafts across the perilous ocean gripped me most. Here we have helpless, starving soldiers who know they are floating ever-further into enemy territory, soldiers who must brave the elements and the fear that bubbles up inside of them ever
The following is an excerpt from the novel that is a must-read and, in my opinion, something we can all learn from and use:
They were, as Coleridge wrote, "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." It was an experience of transcendence. Phil watched the sky, whispering that it looked like a pearl. The water looked so solid that it seemed they could walk across it. Whenbroke the surface far away, the sound carried to the men with absolute clarity. They watched as pristine ringlets of water circled outward around the place where the fish had passed, then faded to stillness. For a while they spoke, sharing their wonder. Then they fell into reverent silence. Their suffering was suspended. They weren't hungry or thirsty. They were unaware of the approach of death. fish
As he watched this beautiful, still world, Louie played with a thought that had come to him before. He had thought it as he had watched hunting seabirds, marveling at their ability to adjust their dives to compensate for the refraction of light in water. He had thought it as he had considered the pleasing geometry of the sharks, their gradation of color, their slide through the sea. He even recalled the thought coming to him in his youth, when he hadon the roof of the cabin in the Cahuilla Indian Reservation, looking up from Zane lain to watch night settling over the earth. Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil. Grey
Joyful and grateful in the midst ofdying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought it, and their time in the doldrums, to an end. slow
Louie found that the raft offered and unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow procession of shark fins, every vista emptywater and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about. save
The ocean was featureless. He looked up. Above him, floating in a bright cloud, he saw human figures, silhouetted against the sky. He counted twenty-one of them. They were singing the sweetest song he had ever heard. Louie stared up, astonished, listening to the singing. What he was seeing and hearing was impossible, and yet he felt absolutely lucid. This was, he felt certain, no hallucination, no vision. He sat under the singers, listening to their voices, memorizing the melody, until they faded away. Phil had heard and seen nothing. Whatever this had been, Louie concluded, it belonged to him alone. flatness
We will never know whether or not what Louie saw was real or not. I believe him when he says that he
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