Suspended Animation

Patrick O’Brian’s sea adventures wouldn’t have worked without some action. Lucky Jack Aubrey has to slip his one ship by five French ships and a land fortress to cut out a valuable prize in harbor, or he has to take his sloop with fourteen guns against a Spanish frigate with thirty-two. (Of course he succeeds in these feats, or he wouldn’t be called Lucky Jack Aubrey.)

But the best parts of the books for me are the long descriptions of daily sea life, when action and danger lie far beyond the horizon. I just reread The Letter of Marque and The Thirteen-Gun Salute – the twelfth and thirteenth installments in the tales of Captain Aubrey and his friend, surgeon, fellow musician, and government agent, Stephen Maturin – and the books are full of a state of nautical suspended animation. HMS Surprise hits the doldrums or simply has days on end of tacking across the Atlantic. In these times, the sailors scrub the decks with their holystones. They play chess. They trade stories. They turn the hour glass and strike the bells. They reef the t’gallant sails. They sing (well, as long as Surprise is a privateer – once reinstated to the Royal Navy, Capt. Aubrey doesn’t go for such frivolity). At one point in one of these books, some character even mentions “suspended animation.”

The frequent tastes of suspended animation in the books don’t all have to do with a sailor’s life, per se. Here and there time stands still as some grand object, literally suspended, brings perspective to time, space, and life. At the end of The Letter of Marque, Stephen dreams of a ride in a hot-air balloon, feeling his cares rolling off his shoulders as he watches clouds go by underneath him. In the middle of The Thirteen-Gun Salute, the best image in the whole series occurs as Stephen sees above him, in a towering wave hovering higher than the ship at the apex of its gigantic undulation, a whale, suspended in the clear, sunlit ocean water.

The best parts of retired life are the boring weeks with no appointments, nothing to do but what Jack’s crew does: read a story or play a song or get all the clocks in the house set to the same time or clean something that hasn’t been ship-shape in a year. (I don’t have any equivalent to reefing t’gallant sails.) Or I might just listen to the murmuring of a million leaves rustling in the gentle summer breeze or drive down the road to the Greenbrier entrance of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and watch the waters of the Little Pigeon River incessantly cascade down the rocks on their way to the ocean Jack Aubrey sailed. But with one thing and another (I don’t need to go into any details), I hadn’t had any boring weeks since the beginning of last July. Maybe I decided to take this angle on O’Brian this year because his images of suspended animation came through my schedule just as all the crises came to resolutions and the blessed boring weeks began again.