Come aboard, If your destination is oblivion

 ‘Come aboard, if your destination is oblivion - it should be our next stop.’

That's a fine sentence from the book Life of Pi by Yann Martel.  This is how Pi Patel invites Orange Juice, the orangutan to his boat.

  

  I thought hard about this - Why did I like this line so much? As usual I have come up with a theory - as always a bizarre one, something even the hyena in Life of Pi would find hard to digest.

  First of all, it has a lot to do with my mood, for I didn't notice such a beautiful sentence when I read Life of Pi for the first time. And for that reason no one else can derive as much happiness as I did on reading that sentence, never. May be there is someone out there who can extract much more happiness out of that sentence than me, but not the exact amount of happiness if happiness could be measured with two decimal places.

  Don’t go away; the bizarre part of theory is not yet over, because the sentence works at another level- with word association and context of the story. For the context, the situation is bleak with Pi losing hope over being lost in the Pacific Ocean. He has a tiger, a heinous hyena and a crippled Zebra for company. He has almost lost all his hope, that' when Orange juice, the orangutan floats up on a pile of banana.

  Do you see the connection between oblivion, horizon and hope? You wouldn't, because I made that up.Horizon rhymes with oblivion, and it also rhymes with hope.

  To Yann Martel's credit, he has used one word to evoke three different images; hope, horizon and mental blankness. Was it his true intention? Or a piece of genius, we will never know, nevertheless he chose the perfect word. For Pi, the statement is an absolute truth; there is no hope of a horizon, only blankness and fear of being forgotten by the world. 

The result is a sublime multi-layered sentence, the context of the story makes it all the more better.

 ‘Come aboard, if your destination is oblivion - it should be our next stop.’

 Sounds weird and unbelievable?  Try giving me a better story, I will gladly accept. After all we believe in miracles not because it is true, but because that is the better story. At desperate times, even despair is romanticized. Aren't we always a foot away from imaginary despairs?