February 21, 2008
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Audaces Fortuna Juvat
Excerpt from David Vann’s “I Do Not Have a Death Wish”
from http://www.esquire.com/features/sailing1207“Offshore yacht racing is still an aristocratic sport, but I think a low-budget attempt on a homemade boat is possible. . . .
. . . I’m building this time in my carport and backyard in Tallahassee,
Florida. I began in mid-August. I bought some steel tubing, which I
welded into a platform fifty feet long and five feet wide. I cut all
the aluminum plates with a forty-dollar circular saw from Home Depot,
using a four-dollar wood blade with carbide tips. I bought a welder and
spool gun for $2,000, a chop saw for $90, a grinder for $70, and a
backup grinder for $30. A few clamps, pliers, measuring tapes, and
pens, and that was it.”Few things annoy me
more than people who tell me that something cannot be done.
Usually those cynics are armchair warriors — ones that haven’t even attempted anything beyond going to the mall to buy clothes. If someone tells me that something cannot be done, they’d better have the credentials to back their critique. Or at the very least, have done something more with their lives than to have smoked one too many hookahs to come up with their profound philosophies of life.
“It
is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face
is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who
errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms,
the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the
best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at
worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his
place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither
victory or defeat.”Theodore
Roosevelt
(Paris Sorbonne,
1910)
