The New World
It begins with a journey.
You must cross an ocean.
Can you imagine...can you feel what it is to cross an ocean?
For weeks you see nothing but the horizon.
All round you, perfect, and empty.
Your ship is small, tiny...a speck in such immensity.
You live with fear, in the grip of fear...fear of storms, fear of sickness on board,
fear of the immensity. What if you never escape? How can you escape?
There's nowhere to go.
So you must drive your fear down, deep into your belly, and study your charts, and watch your compass, and pray for a fair wind...and hope.
Pure naked fragile hope, when all your senses scream at you, Lost!
Lost! Imagine it. Day after day, staring west, the rising sun on your back,
The setting sun in your eyes, hoping, hoping...
At first it's no more than a haze on the horizon,
The ghost of a haze, the pure line corrupted.
But clouds do that, and storms.
So you watch...you watch.
Then it's a smudge, a shadow on the far water.
For a day, for another day, the stain slowly spreads along the horizon,
and takes form...until on the third day you let yourself believe.
You dare to whisper the word...land!
Land. Life. Resurrection. The true adventure.
Coming out of the vast unknown, out of the immensity,
into safe harbor at last.
That...that...is the New World.
-Sir Walter Raleigh in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”
Picture by Marcin Jakubowski
2 comments:
Excellent Movie! Excellent Discourse! :) I was moved to tears when I first heard the words, even more so the second time. Now, reading them here (what did you do? watch the movie while you were typing?) is like hearing the words of an old friend. Thank you for taking time to write out these beautiful words for us.
Nope I lifted it from the screen play...
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