Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, on His Year at Sea)

“I remember dawn coming up over the Strait of Malacca; ragamuffin kids on the dock in Sumatra laughing as they pelted us with bananas; collecting dead flying fish off the deck and bringing them to our sweet, fat, toothless Danish cook to fry up for breakfast. I remember sailing into Hong Kong harbor and seeing my first junk; steaming upriver toward Bangkok, watching the sun rise and set fire to the gold-leafed pagoda roofs; climbing off the stern down a wriggly rope ladder into a sampan, paddling for dear life across the commerce-mad river into the jungle, where it was suddenly quiet and then suddenly loud with monkey-chatter and bird-shriek, the moonlight lambent on the palm fronds.”—Christopher Buckley, “My Year at Sea: Recalling the Splendid Isolation of Travel by Freighter,” The Atlantic, December 2010

He might not be as consequential (for better or worse) than his father, the founder of modern conservativism, William. But for my money, Christopher Buckley is a thousand times more engaging as a writer. I’m not sure that there’s a better satirist writing today, and anytime I see one of his works in print—an article, say, or, increasingly over the last several years, one of his marvelous, laugh-out-loud novels (No Way to Treat a First Lady, Florence of Arabia)—I pounce, knowing that I’m in for something good.

The first item I bought on my Kindle more than a year ago, in fact, was a Buckley novella, a Kindle-only product for The Atlantic, Cynara. That turned out to be funny and, in the end, surprisingly moving.

The nonfiction essay from which today’s quote comes is every bit as good, but in a different key. It’s as if the hypnotic, lyrical prose rhythms of Joseph Conrad had been absorbed, then refracted through the experience of an irreverent, late-20th-century American, recalling his “year of adventure,” going around the world on a tramp freighter in 1970, at 18 years old. Marvelous stuff.

Over the last year, it’s become obvious, from Garry Wills’ recent memoir, Outside Looking In, as well as Buckley’s own narrative of coping with the deaths of his parents, Losing Mum and Pup, that he had a deeply ambivalent relationship with his father. But in certain ways, William F. Buckley Jr. lived most intensely on the water in his boat, and if he had a chance to read Christopher’s essay on life at sea, he would have felt thrilled that, in this sense at least, he greatly influenced his son.