Vox Meditantis

Saturday, 20th November 1858

Twenty-three days now since the last relief, and still the sea will not permit the boat to land. Twenty-three days, and the stores running thin, and this damned wretch before me burning with fever I cannot break. You ask me – or perhaps I ask myself, for there is no other soul here with wit enough to frame the question – if I might converse with any great man of former days, whom should I choose, and for what purpose? I will tell you: I should call back Galen of Pergamon, that learned physician of antiquity, not to learn from him, but to show him this – this – and bid him explain to me by what principle of the humours, by what celestial configuration or balance of bile, a man may be made to sicken and waste whilst I stand by with my powders and my poultices, as useless as a candle in the full glare of the sun.​

What absurdity! What monstrous, contemptible folly it all is! The ancients wrote their great volumes, and we in our time have inherited Jenner’s blessed cowpox, and yet here at the edge of the world where the water beats against the rock day and night without mercy or reason, we are no better than savages. I have bled him – twice – and applied the mustard plaster as I was taught, and still he raves and sweats. The sea brought him here, you understand, washed him up like so much driftwood three weeks past when the Mary Catherine broke apart on the reef. Five men drowned, and this one – God alone knows why – lived long enough to be dragged inside these walls. And for what? To die by inches whilst I stand watch over him, recording his every groan in the station log as though such particulars mattered to anyone.​

The regulations demand it, naturally. The Commissioners must have their reports: the hour the light was kindled, the quantity of oil consumed, the state of the wicks, the direction of the wind, the temperature of the air, and whether the fog-bell was rung, and at what intervals. And now I must add: “Patient continues in a state of high fever; administered laudanum at eight bells; no improvement observed.” As though the scratching of a pen might alter the fact that this man is dying and I can do nothing – nothing – to prevent it.​

They style me a healer. The villagers ashore call me such, at any rate, on account of my having served two years with an apothecary at Penzance and knowing somewhat of simples and the setting of bones. But what healing is there to be done when the very air is thick with salt and damp, when the stores are depleted, when the relief is three weeks overdue and the water – always the water – crashes and roars around us like the laughter of an idiot? It mocks us, that water. It brings the sick and the injured to our door, and then it prevents the surgeon from reaching us, and all the while it goes on with its rising and falling, its inexorable, meaningless rhythm, caring nothing for whether a man lives or dies.​

I have read – in one of the volumes Trinity House provides for our edification – of the great hospitals of London, where men of science attend upon the afflicted with all the resources of modern knowledge. I have read of the lady Miss Nightingale and her works in the Crimea, bringing cleanliness and order to the chaos of war. And what have I here? Four walls, a flickering lamp, a cupboard of dwindling supplies, and the endless, idiotic pounding of the waves. If I could speak with that woman – though it would scarce be proper – I should ask her: What use is order when the water recognises none? What use is cleanliness when the sea spits filth and wreckage onto the rocks day after day? What sense is there in any of it?​

But I know what she would say, or what Galen would say, or any of them: that we must persist in our duty, that there is meaning in the struggle even when the outcome is foreordained. Scripture tells us that we are tried and refined as gold in the furnace, that our sufferings serve some greater design. I am meant to take comfort in that, I suppose. I am meant to find purpose in watching this man die, in trimming the lamp-wicks, in polishing the great lens until it gleams, in descending those hundred and twenty steps each morning to fetch the water and the oil, and then climbing them again, and again, world without end, amen.​

Absurd. It is all absurd. The sea does not care. The light shines out into the darkness, and perhaps it saves a ship, and perhaps it does not, and the water rolls on regardless. I do what I am able for this poor wretch, and he lives or he dies, and the tide comes in and goes out, and none of it signifies a farthing’s worth in the grand reckoning of things. And yet I am bound here – bound by duty, by contract, by the regulations of the service – to continue as though it did.​

If there is absurdity in this world, it is not in the workings of Providence – I will not call it that – but in the plain fact that we go on. We keep the light burning. We tend the sick. We record our observations in the log. We wait for the relief. And the water, the eternal, indifferent water, goes on battering the foundations of this tower, wearing away the stone grain by grain, patient as death itself.​

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.