A Story a Day #63: Max Aub

April 15th, 2020

"The Launch"

Max Aub

A man lives in a small town in Spain his whole life. He is a good man, but he gets awfully seasick. He tries everything to cure it but nothing works. He lives on a beautiful estuary where there is a lovely old oak tree. In a dream, he is a rowing a boat made of the oak tree and he thinks maybe if he makes a boat out of it, he will no longer be seasick. He tries to ignore the idea but eventually gives in. He hires a boatwright to make a boat out of his tree. One day, when the sea is calm, he sets off and is not seasick. He is ecstatic but then realizes the boat is filling with water, but not salt water, fresh water. Eventually a new oak tree grows and rumors spread about what happened to the man.

I rather enjoyed this little story. What I found interesting was how fixated he was on curing his seasickness when he seemed to live rather fine with it. He went to enormous lengths to try and cure it. I think many people do this. They get fixated on one tiny detail about themselves that they don't like and go crazy about it. This man even loses something he really prizes, the oak tree, because of this obsession. In the end, he loses everything due to trying to fix something he probably shouldn't have tried to fix.