Thoughts for Today - from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's substack

Kareem’s Daily Quote

When night came, the white waves rolled back and forth in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on the shore. And they felt that they could then understand. 

Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”

These final words of Stephen Crane’s famous short story “The Open Boat” have haunted me since I first read them when I was a teenager. What did the “great sea’s voice” tell them that they “finally” understood? What mysteries were revealed?

First, some context. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) is famous for his classic novel of the Civil War The Red Badge of Courage. “The Open Boat” is based on his 1897 experience of being stranded at sea for 30 hours after the ship he was traveling on sank off the coast of Florida. Crane and three other men, including an oiler (his job was to oil the machinery on the ship) named Billie, who drowned when their lifeboat overturned, end up in a lifeboat together. Crane, a journalist, wrote a news account of the shipwreck which was widely read and praised. That same year, he wrote “The Open Boat,” his fictional account of the same incident.

The story follows most of the facts of the incident. A ship sinks, and four men try to make it to shore in a lifeboat, they decide to swim for shore, and Billie drowns while the others survive. So, why write a fictional version when he’d already written a popular non-fiction account? Because whatever the great sea was saying couldn’t be conveyed in a news story. News articles are about facts, fiction is about insight into what those facts mean. It’s about Truth.