On Hands

“Adam, listen, no listen, you must listen………what is important in the relation of man to the world is the hand”.

Adam replies, “The Hand?”

“Yes the Hand!”

To underscore his point, he held up one of his greasy, diesel-soaked , calloused meathooks and then grabbed Nicholson’s wrist and held both hands aloft for the son to ponder.

“As long as the hand is the shaping organism of an enterprise, or a relationship, as long as it is the hand which governs your connections with the world, those connections are healthy, living and warm…..Technology! It is technology that is the great destroyer, which comes between the hand and the world, which interposes its own cold deadness between the heart and the world”.

From Adam Nicholson's, "Seamanship, a Voyage along the Wild Coasts of the British Isles."