Great writing jumps from the page and bolts through the air, to resound in the mind and memory. This blog series is devoted to great lines that strike - in literature, speech, music and film.

The opening of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is a visual and philosophical gem. The setting - into which Janie Crawford steps - is the Everglade town of Eatonville at sunset, when the townsfolk are gathered on their porches, idling and gossiping. The novel begins:

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

One mark of great writing is when it presents pearls of wisdom—observed truths in the human condition—that the writer has managed to harvest. The romance in spying ships on the ocean horizon is a universal human notion. Ships are out there, on the sea, headed for adventures and unknown lands. It is far more common to be watching them from the shore than it is to be sailing on them, which makes us project excitement onto them. Ships seem to carry dreams, and the idea that ships hold ‘every man’s wish’ is not to suggest every man’s wish is the same, but that every man can imagine their own wish might be realised by that ship. The idiom of ‘one’s ship coming in’ refers to a windfall - a sudden wealth and success that is the stuff of dreams. The fateful suggestion that dreams are realised ‘for some’, while for others they remain ‘forever’ distant, is not a fancy but a stark reality. The perceived antagonism of ‘Time’, personified in scorning the dreams of the ‘Watcher’, is yet another human truth. Hurston’s confidence in stating that this act of watching ‘is the life of men’ bookends the passage - which is itself observing the ships - giving the observation the weight of verity. The novel’s title is invoked as this opening imagery reflects the truth that mankind is often resigned to its own commonness, while watching greatness from a distance.

FIrst edition cover, J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1937.