This is from a magazine article about going on a luxury cruise (Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise, by David Foster Wallace, Harper's, 1994):In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter in which a cabin boy falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Stephen Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and I get bent out of shape when the kids think the story's dull or just a jaunty adventure: I want them to suffer the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless depths inhabited by tooth studded things rising angelically toward you.This gave me the familiar feeling that we know and love. I actually own a copy of Moby Dick that I've never read. Since it's assigned as required reading in schools, I thought it would be a chore, but now I'm sold on it. I'm definitely going to get "The Open Boat" (which is a short story; 99¢ on Kindle).
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