The Jack Aubrey series by Patrick O'Brian has been my primary literary accompaniment for years now, primarily thought the audiobook reading by Patrick Tull. I am constantly given words for my own interior states, in ways that lighten the load or retouch my experience with new subtlety. Jack and Stephen often seem as real or more to me than many of the people I live and work with. Sometimes that strikes me as a problem, but more often I am just grateful for the diligence of a writer who brought them to life with such humane generosity.
"He was eating his dinner not in the dining-cabin but right aft, sitting with his face to the great stern-window, so that on the far side of the glass and a biscuit-toss below the frigate’s wake streamed away and away from him, dead white in the troubled green, so white that the gulls, poising and swooping over it, looked quite dingy. This was a sight that never failed to move him: the noble curve of shining panes, wholly unlike any landborne window, and then the sea in some one of its infinity of aspects; and the whole in silence, entirely to himself. If he spent the rest of his life on half-pay in a debtors’ prison he would still have had this, he reflected, eating the last of the Cephalonian cheese; and it was something over and above any reward he could possibly have contracted for."
--Treason's Harbour
