Dead Reckoning in Literature
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau suggests the following approach to life:
"In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds."
In Moby Dick, or, The Whale, Herman Melville states on page 507: "...and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log?"
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Famous quotes containing the words dead, reckoning and/or literature:
“And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”
—Bible: New Testament St. John the Divine, in Revelation, 20:12.
“With earth’s first clay they did the last man knead,
There of the last harvest sowed the seed,
And what the first morning of creation wrote,
The last dawn of reckoning shall read.”
—Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1883)
“One of the necessary qualifications of an efficient business man in these days of industrial literature seems to be the ability to write, in clear and idiomatic English, a 1,000-word story on how efficient he is and how he got that way.... It seems that the entire business world were devoting its working hours to the creation of a school of introspective literature.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)