Josh recommended Sea Wolf by Jack London to me the other night at dinner. We were discussing old books we liked and discovered we both love Jack London, but I had never read Sea Wolf. He said he would bring me the book, but I ended up checking it out from the library the next day. I don’t know what it is about novels, but sometimes I MUST have one immediately. Sea Wolf is about a man who is a gentleman scholar and falls off a ferry ship in the San Francisco harbor in a fog, is swept out to sea, and picked up by a seal hunting ship and forced to be a cabin boy for the remainder of the voyage, by the harsh Captain, Wolf Larsen. The symbolism behind Wolf is that he is Satan – and I might give more excerpts as we go along.
Captain Wolf is a self educated man who revels in conversation with the narrator, Hump, who is the first truly educated man Wolf has ever had the opportunity with whom to speak his thoughts.
Here is an excerpt I read this morning:
"And, Hump, I can tell you that you know more about me than any living man, except my own brother."
"And what is he? And where is he?"
"Master of the steamship Macedonia, seal hunter’ was the answer. "we will meet him most probably on the Japan coast. Men call him ‘Death’ Larsen"
"Death Larsen!" I involuntarily cried. "Is he like you?"
"Hardly. He is a lump of an animal without any head. He has all my – my-"
"Brutishness," I suggested
"Yes, – thank you for the word, – all my brutishness, but he can scarcely read or write."
"And he has never philosophized on life," I added.
"No," Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air of sadness. "And he is all the happier for leaving life along. He is too busy living it to think about it. My mistake was in ever opening the books."
the thin line between optimism and delusion... 
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