This was complicated story; full of many “could be” analogies. I was thinking as I read through that maybe it meant this, and then after reading further and more deeply into it I thought it could maybe mean that or was in fact implying something else.
As I read through it I too felt lost at sea, looking for a meaning. Being tossed by the waves of my own complexities; being washed over by my swells of shallowness. But it was until I got to the end (Yes I did read the entire story) that I finally realized any true significance to this story. It’s meaning, it’s purpose, it’s moral, it’s theme.
“When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight,
and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on
shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.”
Summed up in the last paragraph, just as a conclusion should be, the message of the story I feel is not one of any common victory. It’s not one of self righteousness, or revenge. It’s not a sob story, though at times it may seem that way, the way they kept getting tossed around. It was a moral for someone else. That they were the sea’s interpreters meant that they knew it better than anyone. That they had experienced it more fiercely then anyone ever had.
May times they wondered, if they would ever make it out and why nature had reared its ugly head at them. To have brought them so far to only drown them in the end.
“If I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned--if I am going
to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea,
was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I
brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to
nibble the sacred cheese of life?”
What had they lived so long for if only to die? The truth is that we will all surely die someday, but to brave the open sea during such a dangerous storm, and with such perfidious waves, would only be the biggest “slap-in-the-face” to a seaman.
Sometimes we go through things not because they necessarily do anything for us, or that we might directly benefit from them, but so that we can be a help to others when they go through the same things; that we might become interpreters of our own situations and circumstances.
“Oh, cool,” you say, “but why does it matter? Why can’t they figure things out for themselves?”
Believe it or not you were placed on this earth for such a purpose to be a blessing. It matters because as soon as the person you love the most ends up going through something that you’ve just gone through or been through before; your able to be their interpreter; because you’ve been there and experienced it for yourself. It matters because you’re not the only one out there, which means most of the time it’s not going to be about you. That the pain we sometimes go through is for the benefit of others. It matters because others matter.
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