. . . he met an old sailor who argued that the people in the city were detained in a prison, the prison of the way in which each made his living and all secured the goods deemed necessary or desirable. The old sailor said that the objects of attention were dictated by this fact; conscious life was preoccupied and not free; the attitudes toward Nature were determined by the operation of instruments in the fields and on the water; the relationship between a man and his brother was determined by each one’s function and no man’s heart. Yet, said the old sailor, this is what at the beginning was desired, although no more. The honorable, the justifiable, the notable, the beautiful were dictated by a center of feeling which was itself merely a narrow response to the manifold forms of the way in which each good in general was made, secured, kept, taken and given. The boy was shocked to hear this, and disturbed by the old sailor’s advice, namely, to go to sea and to seek among the rocking scenes of indeterminacy a certain freedom of feeling, also freedom from the ways of the city. This seemed to him merely the counsel of evasion and escape. . . .