Hilton Head Island: from THE OCEAN WAITS

8:22 PM.  The sun is touching Pickney Island.  I have pushed my chair to the side so that it is not blinding me.  From my new angle Skull Creek is rippled and silver.  If I sit forward and look west it is golden.

Rereading my books has been a voyage into the past.  Not one of nostalgia.  There were countless moments of joy.   There were countless moments of despair, particularly in the last half of THE OCEAN WAITS.  I do not know whether there were more of one or the other.  I do know I would not relive my life if I could.  Once was enough.  This reviewing my past is to bring myself up to the present and understand what I have been and am so that I can decide how I ought to live the remainder of my life.

I expect that some of you have read THE OCEAN WAITS.  

Here is part of what I found of value in rereading it myself and those passages which Amazon tells me others underlined.

The book begins with an apologia.  An apologia is not an apology, but an explanation of why one holds a given position.  THE OCEAN WAITS begins with an apologia.

Here are the passages Kindle tells me readers underlined.

On the passage from Darwin to Bali I wrote this which I have always remembered.

I left CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE in Singapore until the trade winds reversed as they only do in that ocean and Suzanne and I flew back to California to spend time with my grandmother.  Along the way we stopped in Hong Kong and from there visited Macao, which was then still governed by Portugal.  In the Old Protestant Cemetery I copied the inscriptions on two tombstones of seamen who had died there.

While being transported under arrest for suspicion of being a spy from Rabigh Gaol to a new cell in Jiddah.

This comes from CHIDICOK TICHBORNE 2 which I added to the Kindle edition of the book.

I was caught with full sail up  in the Gibraltar Strait by a wind called the Levanter because it comes from the east   

And almost final thoughts:

The final thought:  I just looked at the hard copy of the book I have.  After losing everything years later at the sinking of RESURGAM, I had to buy my own books second hand.  My copy of THE OCEAN WAITS was once a library book.  I just noticed that inside the back cover is stamped:  DISCARD.