what difference, loss or gain

I have just finished reading The Death Ship by B. Traven for the second time. Many years have separated the readings, and I am glad I have waited so long.
For anyone who has not read The Death Ship, do so, but only if you have a sound emotional and spiritual foundation - this book will shake you to the core. Anyone reading this blog will know that I am not easily shaken, and do not lightly post such things as "shake you to the core," so take heed.
Beyond the overt anti-authoritarian and anarchist leanings of the book, it underscores the worthlessness of the human cogs in the wheels of the global capitalist machine and highlights the evil that permeates the world of those wretched people whose god is money.
Give me the Yorrike any day, a fine ship on whom all are equal in their pain, suffering, and lack of statehood, a foul tramp whose every surface seems designed to rend flesh and to sear it from the bones. Her bowels so much resemble the world in which some modern fools toil, those too smart to sell their soul for pennies, those who refuse to break themselves for a shiny pair of shoes or to adjust to society's accepted standards, those who have rejected all and become outcast and shunned, abandoned, hanging onto life by a thread but happier than the banker sitting in his high and shining home.
Most shocking for me this reading around was the progression of the Yorrikkan sailors from living souls to walking dead, a process I realize I have also undertaken in the years following my father's Great Speech of Paternal Punishment, during which he tore from me the honest and deep-rooted will to live.
I am dead inside, a bunkmate to Pippip and Stanislav. Now I know why people fear me, why women instinctively grasp the hand of an errant child at my approach, why I am looked upon with sheltered fear and resignation, why I can only maintain the lie of life for so long before people become wise and seek company other than my own.
Thank you, Yojimbo, for staying with me as I cried, for being too young to ask me why, for allowing me to accept my broken inner state in pitiful silence, for not trying to soothe the pain, for loving me when I had lost the strength to love myself.
Although I may seem to walk past you, dear reader, on the street, there is forever a death ship rolling beneath my feet; I am resigned to this state, and begrudge not the Universe for the way things have turned out.

numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
X