Slant wav­ing lines of rain were blow­ing across the bow. The wind whipped his trouser legs and water spat­tered his face. Willie wedged him­self in the lee of the bridge­house. The bow plunged into a trough, and cut a wave into two foam­ing black streams as it rose again. Spray blew past Willie and drenched the deck and the bridge, drip­ping down on him.

He loved these lonely moments on the fore­cas­tle, in all weath­ers. There was balm in the wide sea and the fresh wind for all the itchy afflic­tions of life on the Caine. In the late stormy twi­light he could see the dim forms of the Moun­tauk, the Kala­ma­zoo, and the near­est destroy­ers of the screen, small toss­ing shapes of an intenser black on the gray-black of the ocean. Inside those shapres were light, and warmth, and noise, and all the thou­sand rit­u­als of Navy life, and–for all he knew–crises as wild and unlikely as the straw­berry affair on the Caine. Which of the watch­ers on the other bridges, see­ing the nar­row old minesweeper plung­ing through the steep waves, could guess that its crew was full of muti­nous mut­ter­ings, and that its cap­tain was immured in his room, test­ing innu­mer­able keys in a pad­lock, his eyes gleaming?

The sea was the one thing in Willie’s life that remained larger than Queeg. The cap­tain had swelled in his con­scious­ness to an all-pervading pres­ence, a giant of mal­ice and evil; but when Willie filled his mind with the sight of the sea and the sky, he could, at least for a while, reduce Queeg to a sickly well-meaning man strug­gling with a job beyond his pow­ers. The hot lit­tle fevers of the Caine, the dead­lines, the inves­ti­ga­tions, the queer ordi­nances, the dreaded tantrums, all these could dwin­dle and cool to comic pic­tures, con­trasted with the sea–momentarily. It was impos­si­ble for Willie to carry the vision back below decks. One rake on his nerves, a ward­room buzzer, a pen­ciled note, and he was sucked into the fever world again. But the relief, while it lasted, was deli­cious and strength­en­ing. Willie lin­gered on the gloomy splash­ing fore­cas­tle for half an hour, gulp­ing great breaths of the damp wind, and then went below.

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“Oh, for a girl in any case there’s noth­ing so awful about it. All girls take pride in being pro­posed to.”
“All girls, yes, but not her.”
Oblon­sky smiled. He under­stood this feel­ing of Levin’s very well, he knew that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two kinds: one kind was—all the girls in the world except her, and those girls had every human frailty and were very com­mon­place girls; the other kind was—she alone, with no frail­ties at all and far beyond all mankind.
“Wait a sec­ond, you must have some of this sauce,” he said, keep­ing Levin’s hand from push­ing the sauce away.
Levin obe­di­ently helped him­self to the sauce, but did not give Oblon­sky a chance to eat.
“No, now you listen—listen!” he said. “You can under­stand that for me this is a ques­tion of life or death. I’ve never spo­ken about it to any­one. And I can’t speak about it to any­one as I can with you. You and I, after all, are com­pletely dif­fer­ent from each other in every way: dif­fer­ent tasts, opin­ions, every­thing; but I know you’re fond of me and under­stand me, and because of that I’m ter­ri­bly fond of you. But for God’s sake you must be absolutely frank!”
P 39

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Noth­ing would have seemed sim­pler than for him, a man thirty-two years old, of good fam­ily and rich rather than poor, to pro­pose to Princess Shcherbatsky; in all like­li­hood he would instantly have been acknowl­edged as a first-rate match. But Levin was in love, and because of this it seemed to him that Kitty was such per­fec­tion in every way, a being far above every­thing else on earth, while he was a lowly, earthy crea­ture, that it was absolutely unthink­able for oth­ers and her­self to regard him as wor­thy of her.

AK Pg 23

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And Levin left the room, only remem­ber­ing when he was already at the door that he had for­got­ten to say good-bye to Oblonsky’s colleagues.

P 22

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He was of medium height, some­what chubby, and good look­ing, with curly red hair and an inno­cent, gay face, more remark­able for a humor­ous air about the eyes and large mouth than for any strength of chin or nobil­ity of nose. He had grad­u­ated from Prince­ton in 1941 with high marks in all sub­jects except math­e­mat­ics and sci­ences. His aca­d­e­mic spe­cialty had been com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture. But his real career at Prince­ton had con­sisted of play­ing the piano and invent­ing bright lit­tle songs for par­ties and shows.

p. 1

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The sec­re­tary had come in, famil­iarly def­er­en­tial, and with that cer­tain mod­est aware­ness, com­mon to all sec­re­taries, of supe­ri­or­ity to their supe­ri­ors in their knowl­edge of affairs, came over to Oblon­sky with some papers and, in the form of a ques­tion, began explain­ing some dif­fi­culty. Oblon­sky did not let him fin­ish, but ami­ably placed his hand on his sleeve:
“No, do it the way I told you to,” he said, soft­en­ing the remark with a smile, and briefly explain­ing his view of the mat­ter handed the papers back and said: “So do it that way, please.”
The embar­rassed sec­re­tary went off.
P 21

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Queeg’s com­plaints in these inter­views were about the slow­ness of decod­ing, or the rout­ing of mail, or the cor­rec­tion of pub­li­ca­tions, or a smell of cof­fee com­ing from the radio shack, or an error of a sig­nal­man in copy­ing a message–it did not much mat­ter what. Willie began to develop a deep, dull hate for Queeg. It was noth­ing like the hate he had felt against Cap­tain de Vriess. It was like the hate of a hus­band for a sick wife, a mature, solid hate, caused by an unbreak­able tie to a loath­some per­son, and exist­ing not as a self-justification, but for the rot­ten gleam of plea­sure it gave off in the con­tin­u­ing gloom.

p. 352

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Inex­orably as a cold satel­lite, the event moves nearer and nearer to Now. What strain­ing philoso­pher ever got as good an intu­ition of the onward flow of time as does a hes­i­tant bride while her sands of maid­en­hood run swiftly out?

p. 173

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