himself.
The ocean isn’t real y very different, though it can be more
flamboyant. It simply is; it doesn’t require one’s at ention;
there is no arrogance however fierce it can become. I took a
freighter from Heraklion to Savannah to New York City. In
the two and a half weeks on the ocean, I mainly listened: to
the narrative of Tolstoy’s
every day; to the earth buried miles under the ocean; to the
astonishing stil ness of the water, potentially so wild and deadly,
on most nights blanketed by an impenetrable darkness; to the
things living under and around me; to the crew and captain of
the ship; to the one family also making the trek, the sullenness
of the teen, the creativity of a younger child, the brightness of
the adults’ optimism.
It seems a false analogy - my father and the ocean - because
my father was a humble man and the ocean is overwhelming
until one sees that it simply is what it is. From my father and
from the ocean, I learned to listen with concentration and poise
to the women who would talk to me years later: the women
who had been raped and prostituted; the women who had
been bat ered; the women who had been incested as children.
I think that sometimes they spoke to me because they had an
intuition that the difficulty in saying the words would not be
in vain; and in this sense my father and the ocean gave me the
one great tool of my life - an ability to listen so closely that
I could find meaning in the sounds of suf ering and pain,
anger and hate, sorrow and grief. I could listen to a barely
executed whisper and I could listen to the shrill rant. I knew
never to shut down inside; I learned to defer my own reactions
and to consider listening an honor and a holy act. I learned
patience, too, from my father and from that ocean that never
ends but goes round again circling the earth with no meaning,
nothing outside itself. One need not go to the moon to see the
cascading roundness of our globe because the ocean shows
it and says it; there are a million little sounds, tiny noises,
the same as in a human heart. Had I never been on the
freighter I think I would never have learned anything except
the tangled ways of humans fighting - ego or war. The words
on Kazantzakis’s grave say, “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free. ” On the freighter and from my father I learned the final lesson of Crete, and it would stand me in good stead
years later in fighting for the rights of women, especially
sexual y abused women: I hope for nothing; I fear nothing; I
