September 10, 2007
I'm in the middle of reading Jack London's Cruise of the Snark. Several of the passages he wrote about taking an around-the-world voyage in a sailboat resonated rather well, given some of the questions we've been asked about why we travel, so of course I thought I'd let someone else more coherently express what I feel.
Our friends cannot understand why we make this voyage. They think I am crazy. In return, I am sympathetic. It is a state of mind familiar to me. We are all prone to think there is something wrong with the mental processes of the man who disagrees with us.
The ultimate word is I LIKE....It is I LIKE that makes the drunkard drink and the martyr wear a hair shirt; that makes one man a reveller and another man an anchorite; that makes one man pursue fame, another gold, another love, and another God. Philosophy is very often a man's way of explaining his own I LIKE.
...The things I like constitute my set of values. They thing I like most of all is personal achievement--not achievement for the world's applause, but achievement for my own delight. It is the old, "I did it! I did it! With my own hands I did it!"
