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The Solitude of the Open Sea

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Books

Publisher: Seaworthy Publications Inc.
List Price: $15.95
Our Price: $12.44
You Save: $ 3.51 ( 22% )
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A collection of 17 narrative essays that range from the light and humorous to the sobering and reflective even including a harrowing brush with death.


DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9781892399229
ISBN: 1892399229
Label: Seaworthy Publications Inc.
Manufacturer: Seaworthy Publications Inc.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 259
Publication Date: 2005-02
Publisher: Seaworthy Publications Inc.
Studio: Seaworthy Publications Inc.


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Chasing the Horizon: The Life and Times of a Modern Sea Gypsy
• Blue Horizons: Dispatches from Distant Seas
• A Splendid Madness: A Man, a Boat, a Love Story
• Sailing the Dream
• Maiden Voyage


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: Myopic and Condescending
Comment: I recommend that you pass on this book. I purchased it based on an advertisement and the current Amazon recommendations, but I found the author to be myopic and condescending. In one chapter, he describes some short stature tourists as "munchkins." In another, he discusses his thought process on turning back to New Zealand during a gale, and decides against it because his crew might flee and he would have difficulty finding new crew. Obviously, the primary concern should be protection of crew and not the convenience of the captain. He seems obsessed with money and the cost of items to the point of being miserly. For example, when a crew member with whom he has been romantically involved takes her leave, he makes a point of explaining how he offered to buy from her a pair of swim fins to give her some road money. He continually discusses his purchase of food from street vendors and its low cost - while commenting on the unsanitary manner in which it is served. Most of the travel discussions are little more than tourist bus rides. Frankly, I found the author's egocentric point of view distracting to the point of being offensive. Pass.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a different kind of sailing book
Comment: Most sailing books are the I got here using this sail with the wind from the south, etc. variety. This is quite different. It is a single, male in self imposed exile on a sailboat. Interacting with the local cultures to some degree, but never a part of it, and thus an observer. A sharp, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, sometimes sad observer. Most are stories and observations at his various longer stops along the way.

True to what any of us might experience going solo, with assorted crew, around the world. A couple would have had a different experience, and perhaps fit in better, but would not notice what he does.
Highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Just a Sailing Book
Comment: Gregory Newell Smith's The Solitude of the Open Sea, a collection of narrative essays drawn from Smith's around-the- world sailing adventures, is much more than a sailing book: it is an insightful reflection on cross-cultural misunderstandings and the problems of cultural isolation; an album of portraits of fascinating people (his account of a young English woman, "Florence," was my favorite); and, most of all, the book is a philosophical examination of solitude and how being alone on his journey shaped his experiences.
The title essay, which tells of Smith's 53-day solo passage from Panama to Hawaii, explains how a full appreciation of solitude goes beyond merely being alone, away from other people. On the contrary, it is through solitude that Smith is able to experience communion with nature and all of its power, a sublimity that, for Smith, is inspired by the breadth and majesty of the open sea. The experience of the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic that overwhelms the observer in a way that ordinary perception cannot.
The sense of what Smith calls "wonder and awe" is difficult to apprehend outside of nature, though it is perhaps approached in some Chinese and Western landscape paintings. As Smith writes, "It took the sea's total freedom and the solitude I found there to finally achieve the communion I'd sought for so many years. When I found that communion, . . . it was a communion with Nature, with the universe beheld each day, with the wind, the waves, the sky, and the creatures of the sea. . . . For a brief time I was at peace. There was nothing I truly desired, no other person I needed to make me feel whole. My world was complete."
What Smith experienced on the open sea was nature mysticism, which differs from traditional mysticism in at least two ways. First, nature mystics are extroverted, by which I mean that all their senses, including the kinesthetic, are stimulated. By contrast, other mystics turn inward and deliberately shut down their senses. Second, traditional mystics, rather than merging with nature, experience a fusion with God or the universal soul (atman) of the Hindus.
Both types of mysticism, however, do draw a person into the Eternal Now. Smith writes, "I can think of no more immediate experience than sailing by oneself. . . . we feel bored or lonely when we are no longer living in the present moment. We want a change of circumstances, to be somewhere else or doing something else. We separate ourselves from our immediate reality by positing an alternate. We react rather than respond." The mystics and the sea teach us the same lesson: "The key is acceptance: eventually the sea will get you to admit that one of the few things you can change in life is your attitude. A successful ocean passage is therefore nothing short of the union of the boat and its crew with the natural environment, and exemplifies the difference between reacting and responding."
By the end of the book, however, Smith has learned that he really needs soul fusion and not just nature mysticism. "I know I should be savoring each and every moment of this wonderful sailing-around-the-world life, but my willingness to experience wonder and awe has been drained by the absence of a soul mate with whom to share it." This confession appears at odds with his claim that the open sea is a cure for loneliness and boredom, but now, although he has "increased [his] capacity for solitude," he admits that he is lonely.
Smith fears that his profound experiences of the sublime have made him less than fit for ordinary human fellowship. Nature accepts us unconditionally and she is fair and faithful, "treating us with he same care and respect she affords all." But most human beings want more than this-they are after all social animals-and each of us desires a special someone in a unique relationship of love and trust.
Smith is able to admit that his life is not complete, and that he really does need another person to make him whole. He acknowledges that he has been "nursing [a] resentment about having no partner, no soul mate, no special person with whom to share the journey." Furthermore, he has discovered that other lands, such as New Zealand, even though very much like his own Pacific Northwest, could not really be his home. "I'll leave those places to their own natives, to those people who, as Terry Tempest Williams writes, naturally comprehend their landscapes and hold them as sanctuary inside their unguarded hearts."
In addition to insightful ruminations on solitude, the author also reflects on the difficulties of cross-cultural understanding. The reader gets the impression that Smith initially assumed that Euro-American "cruisers"-those who sail leisurely from island to island, continent to continent-would be ideal emissaries for international understanding. The actual experience, however, was far from what he expected.
Though he is not as cynical as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein ("One culture misunderstands another; and a petty culture misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way") he still comes to some rather negative conclusions: "There is little meaningful interaction between the cultures, as if both sides recognize the impossibility of either being able to fathom the other. Notions of universal brotherhood are pragmatically reduced to simple acceptance, without any real understanding of each other's lives."
He expresses his frustration at his failure to make further inroads into the native environment, but recognizes that his frustration is equally a measure of his own society's values and their hold on him. Nor does Smith believe that we westerners can hope to "go native;" no matter how much we may try, they will always remain at a distance from the culture we would embrace, forever identified by the locals as the outsider, the "Other."
The Solitude of the Open Sea is a marvelous book, both philosophically astute and a constant pleasure to read. Through a series of carefully chosen snapshots, Gregory Newell Smith has ably recreated the daily realities of extended travel and the insights it provides, ranging from the depths of despair, to the humdrum quotidian rituals, to the dizzying heights of rapture. The book is also a portrait of a caring, deeply introspective man-a nature mystic if you will-searching for peace with himself and with the world.


Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Book!
Comment: In the nineteen-nineties, approaching the age of forty, Gregory Newell Smith gave up his career as a Seattle corporate lawyer, sold most everything he owned, bought an ocean-going sailboat, and set out to see the world. After logging more than 45,000 blue water miles, and circling the globe aboard his Fast Passage 39, Atlantean, Smith returned to the Northwest to write a book about his travels. It's a dream many of us have had, and few have followed through on.

"I wanted to write about what it was really like to be out there," Smith said when I spoke to him recently about his newly published book The Solitude of the Open Sea. "Extended travel is a life changing event, but it didn't make sense to tell readers everything I did in the three and half years I was underway." Smith's solution was to craft a collection of seventeen stories from his journeys, each of them drawing upon a particular experience in order to address the themes of his book, which he describes as "broadening our horizons beyond the known and commonplace, freeing ourselves from cultural self-centeredness, and achieving self-discovery through perseverance, hardship, and solitude."

Smith begins with the title essay, an account of his fifty-three day solo passage from Panama to Hawaii. Though Smith rarely traveled alone-he used pick-up crew for nearly all of his ocean passages, and the Hawaii passage actually takes place near the end of his journey-it's a good place for the reader to start, because Smith's perspective throughout the book is very much that of the lone traveler confronting a "world of strange customs . . . and people who don't look like us or speak our language." Almost all of Smith's stories address his experiences ashore (only three of them are set exclusively at sea), and they do not appear in chronological order, which may frustrate those readers looking for the typical "went there and did this" account. For this reason, I would say The Solitude of the Open Sea is more a collection of travel narratives than sailing stories, though I imagine it will be the armchair sailors who will be initially drawn to the title.

Smith is a careful observer, and his descriptions of the traveling life ring true. There are highs and lows, ranging from the idyllic joys of exploring the "jeweled anchorages" of Tonga's Vava'u Group, to the depressing realities of Madagascar's descent into poverty and environmental devastation. But Smith rarely gives way to the easy cynicism of some travel writers who call our attention to the fact that the South Seas are hardly the paradise many of us would like to believe. He points out that exploring the world by sailboat gives the cruiser a unique advantage-the boat is home, a refuge for those times when life on foreign shores becomes too much to face on a daily basis.

It's Smith's voice that impressed me from the outset and kept me reading. I never forgot that the author was a real person, willing to admit when he was terrified (climbing the mast to replace a broken halyard in the midst of a five-day gale) or lonely (overcome by nostalgic memories during night watch on the Indian Ocean). I appreciate that kind of honesty in a writer, but I was most surprised by Smith's lyrical prose, such as when he refers to Joseph Campbell's "rapture of life" upon hearing a lone bagpiper's sunset skirl on New Zealand's Great Barrier Island. Clearly this man cares about what's happening around him, and is unafraid to listen to his soul.

One of the back cover reviews says, "This book will make the reader want to get out there and do it." I agree, but at age seventy, and with a "busted gut" (a hernia, in the parlance of the tars that inhabit the mess deck in Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series), my most ambitious sailing days are probably behind me. At least with books like The Solitude of the Open Sea, readers like me can be there in our imaginations, as Smith puts it, "spending this precious gift we call life finding out how much the world has to offer, over the horizon and not so very far away."

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