Web Chiles: He wanted to live an epic life

a sailor is an artist whose medium is the wind

live passionately, even if it kills you, because something is going to kill you anyway

--Webb Chiles (5 circumnavigations, several records, first American to sail around Cape Horn alone)

“Old men should be explorers.” I first read that in a book by Jan de Hartog, but subsequently came across it in T. S. Eliot’s FOUR QUARTETS, which predates Hartog by several decades. I don’t know if there is an even earlier source.

INTHEPRESENTSEA

T.S Eliot

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.