What eludes the effort of definition is preserved in every culture through the laborious work on images: the view of the whole of reality, the world, life, and history. In the great metaphors and parables, what has been gained in imaginative orientation is reflected, transformed, and expanded. One of the ever-present shapes is that of life as a sea voyage. It encompasses departure and return, harbor and foreign shores, anchorage and navigation, storm and calm, distress at sea and shipwreck, bare survival and mere observation. The metaphor provides both the outline of a whole with many conditions and possibilities as well as the limits of the nearly impossible, which is offered to all others, at best, as a sailor's yarn.