Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

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What he got—what we all got—was something botched and bastardized, something at times almost biblical in its run of torments and dark forces. We got failure, we got fuckup, we got farce. And I, more than some, was a contributor to that failure and farce.

And yet I don’t regret a minute of it, for the simple reason that what we got besides—what we got because—was something weirdly and wildly beautiful; for some of us something magnificent; for a few even romantic, and in the ensnarement of romance I include myself. For amidst the strain and privation and exhaustion, I grew to love that botched journey; to love the boat, to love the people, the little ship of fools, as I came to think of them, a crew fancifully and farcically, and always it seemed fatefully, intertwined.

What Steve got finally that none of the rest of us got was himself, a man bent to an all-but-impossible standard—to ambition, to truth, to exactitude; to discipline and excellence.

And he got Margaret—incorrigible, shape-shifting Margaret, a woman who if she had paid her dues and done her time and been a half turn more circumspect might have been his ally instead of his nemesis.