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?"
Read more about this topic: Dead Reckoning
Famous quotes containing the words dead, reckoning and/or literature:
“And crossed the dark defile at last, and found
At Roncevaux upon the darkening plain
The dead against the dead and on the silent ground
The silent slain—”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“He wasn’t off a mere degree;
His reckoning was off a sea.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign,—is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)