The Vagaries of a Melancholy Mood

As the ship steamed relent­lessly south­ward at full speed ahead, the mood of the crew grew con­spic­u­ously more somber. Forced to let go of the fren­zied and orgias­tic plea­sures of a Dionysian hol­i­day in Japan, they unwill­ingly sur­ren­dered them­selves to the more Apol­lon­ian way of life found onboard the ship. Totally inca­pable of see­ing beyond a purely emo­tional response to their sit­u­a­tion, they quickly suc­cumbed, one after another, to the vagaries of a melan­choly mood.

How eas­ily were they seduced by this invis­i­ble body of neb­u­lous feel­ings and deep dark emo­tions as it descended upon them with the caprice of an Olympian god. Instead of wrestling with this god, as Jacob had, they sim­ply fell prey to all of its emo­tional blus­ter. In their inabil­ity to free their feel­ings from the emo­tional pall that over­shad­owed their souls, like a dark night, they failed to expose the naked truth of the god that lay hid­den within the mood.

Hav­ing pre­vailed, thus far, against suc­cumb­ing to the mood that’d descended upon the rest of the crew, like the plague, I was struck by the mag­ni­tude of its power when the ship pulled within sight of the coast of Viet­nam. As I stood in awe of the dark fore­bod­ing clouds which hugged the earth and stirred the pas­sions of her murky green waters into a squall, I sensed a great evil lurked about this land—that no good could come from our being here. “You do not belong here,“ I heard my soul scream out in the shrill voice of a Siren. Imme­di­ately, I saw her words as the truth which lay hid­den at the very core of the mood that’d finally swept over us all.

Badly shaken by this sud­den rev­e­la­tion, I turned aside, only to find Greg ’n’ Harold stand­ing there with me. “We don’t belong here,“ I prophet­i­cally proclaimed.

The two of them just looked at me and smiled, as if to say that while they both agreed with my assess­ment of this exter­nal sign, they were at a com­plete loss as to what to do about it.