From the Boat
Dear all,
The weather at this latitude is not, as the uninformed might suppose, unpleasant. There is a particular quality to a July sky above open water that I can only describe as instructive. It does not move quickly. It does not apologize. I have been watching it since approximately four o'clock this morning, when a copy of the Tribune (dated, I note, the twenty-second of June) arrived via a private arrangement I will not go into here, and I read, with the lamp swung low to compensate for the motion, that the city of Philadelphia has repainted its municipal parking structures in what the correspondent called a "bold new palette." I did not know Philadelphia had a palette. I did not know it had ambitions in that direction. I set the paper down and watched the sky until it became the color it is now, which is the color of an oyster that has been told something unwelcome.
I am reminded, by nothing in particular and everything in general, of the staff retreat of 1986, which we held, as you will recall, at the inn outside of Montclair. Or perhaps it was Metuchen. The inn had a porch and the porch had a view and the view was of a field in which nothing remarkable was occurring, which seemed to suit us. I had brought a case of something Burgundian and a typescript of what would become, if I am not mistaken, the enterprise's celebrated "Words of Girth" supplement, first issued in the autumn of that year. Margaret sat at the end of the long table and corrected my pronunciation of four separate words over the course of the weekend, and she was right about three of them. The fourth remains disputed, at least from where I am sitting, which is here, on the Margaret IV, in a July that does not apologize.
I have seen Bart's recent decision to restructure the "Of Considerable Mass" column into a biweekly rotating format, and I will say only this: I would not have done it that way. I would have done it the other way, which is to say the original way, which has the additional quality of being correct. Bart is, however, a capable steward of the enterprise, and I trust him as one trusts a compass that has been dropped once. It still points somewhere. It points with conviction.
There was an advertisement I memorized, perhaps in 1973, from a publication whose name I have set aside temporarily. It went: "Some men inherit the world. Others build one, word by word, at considerable personal expense." I cut it out and taped it to the wall of the Manhattan office, sixty-two dollars a month, fully serviced, and I do not know if it is still there because I have not visited since 1991 and I do not intend to. The sentiment, however, travels.
The enterprise must carry on, and it will, as it always has, through weather that does not move quickly and does not apologize, and under a sky that instructs.
Bertram Whitmore
Publisher, At Sea