by the snapshot of Blanche or of Franc;:oise,
by his reading of Kant, Maupassant, Karl Marx, and his buying
smokes by the carton.
You can tell a captain from the Admiralty
by his lonely thinking, by profound disgust
towards anything that is blue and vast,
by his memory of his in-laws, which loses, he thinks, its accuracy.
And only a ship acts always as though she could
be another ship. Combing the waves that hold her,
a ship resembles at once an albatross and an alder
from under whose feet the ground has slipped for good.
III
Exchanges in the Lounge
"Of course the Archduke is a monster! And of course it matters!
But he's trying his best. Whereas his subjects, they . . . "
"Masters resent their slaves. Slaves resent their masters.
Feels like a vicious circle!" "Like a sort of ring-buoy, I'd say."
"What a splendid sherry!" "Gosh, you know, I couldn't sleep a wink.
It's this frightful sun: it burns your skin through the bodice."
". . . but what if we've sprung a leak!? I've read leaks are hard to
notice
Imagine, we've sprung a leak! And we are - to sink!
Has this ever happened to you, lieutenant?" "No, but I have had a
sour
experience with a shark." "Yeah? But I mean, a leak . What if ... "
"Well, then you'll finally meet the passenger from 8-F."
"Who is that?" "She's the governor's daughter, sailing to Curac;:ao."
IV
Exchanges on the Deck
"I, Professor, too, as a kid, wanted, and badly so,
to discover some insect , or better still, a virus ... "
"Right. And what happened?" "Well, science involves weird
