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lost in reverie by the window? You take them for granted as backup for your life, as satellites revolving around your planet.
    Aboard ship it is different: there each person is a fresh discovery, every new face shines in the limelight. Though you may be as important as Moses, you get used to the idea that everyone else has a story to tell. During all those years when you had no idea of their existence, your fellow passengers were busy leading lives of their own, and naturally they are eager to share the details.
    My Danish friend was orphaned at a young age and never knew either of his parents. He knocked around on his own and from early on put his little hands to work to earn his keep, since he couldn’t depend on the kindness of relatives to whom a piece of bread was as precious as gold. He had much to tell and he wanted to tell it all at once, but he would rein himself in and begin with his first moment of self-awareness, which occurred when he lost his faith.
    When he was a boy, faith burned in him like the flames of a hundred church candles. Every crucifix was a fiery thorn in his flesh. His heart yearned for the one who had died nailed to the cross and for the holy virgin who had given this martyr-god to the world. Then one day his fishing village was shaken by a horrible tragedy. A fishing boat capsized, drowning all eighteen aboard. The wailing of the mothers, fathers, brides, children, wives, and the peals of the church bell in the center of town ringing out the misfortune—this was familiar from all the ballads about the hazards of life on the sea. One need only recall Charles Kingsley’s “Three Fishers”:
    Three fishers went sailing away to the west,
Away to the west as the sun went down;
Each thought on the woman who loved him the best,
And the children stood watching them out of the town.
    Drownings are not uncommon in fishing villages, but when they occur they send a shudder down your spine and children stare terrified at the waters lapping the shore as they would at a cold-blooded murderer.
    Eighteen drowned was a considerable haul, even for the piratical North Sea, and all of Denmark was in a frenzy. A prominent clergyman was sent down from Copenhagen to eulogize the unfortunate fishermen. When he learned that the drowned men had belonged to another Christian denomination, he condemned them to eternal damnation because they had impudently strayed from the true path. The priest’s eulogy caused a scandal and all the newspapers seethed. The priest’s sermon was salt on the widows’ wounds. They wailed like cats at the thought of their husbands, fathers, and brothers roasting in eternal fires of hell. It was then that our young Scandinavian spat on belief and set out for America.
    My new Danish friend spoke with great passion. He was one of those introspective types, with a dash of Dostoyevsky, though he was no epileptic but rather, physically vigorous. Religion, God, Woman, Purpose, Afterlife—he was burdened by a mass of confused ideas, and spoke of his loss of faith with heavy heart. Although he pretended to have closed a chapter in his life, faith was as necessary for him as breathing, eating, or sleeping. It was such people whom Mary Baker Eddy must have had in mind when she founded her theological laboratory of Christian Science.
    He became a Socialist, transferring his passion from God to a faith in human brotherhood, especially the brotherhood of the proletariat. The austere, overintellectualized Karl Marx, with his precise, almost mathematical social axioms, became the young Dane’s fount of inspiration. He yearned for the utopian Red heaven, but his hopes were dashed when first the British Socialists and then the Germans began—here he apologized—“to shit all over themselves,” and all that remained of his one-time political faith was an interest in the cooperative movement and a hope in Roosevelt.
    But he was getting ahead of himself. When he first came to America he worked like a mule