Finding Meaning in Philip Gerard's "Adventures in Celestial Navigation"

Introduction

Philip Gerard's essay Adventures in Celestial Navigation is a work of creative nonfiction that leads the reader toward a deeper understanding of the word "navigation." At once an account of actual voyages and an explanation of how those voyages are accomplished through skillful navigation, it is also a series of musings on the sublime navigation we all pursue in one form or another.

On the simplest level, the essay is a first-person account of the author's attempts to learn traditional celestial navigation. Gerard explains how navigation is both a science and an art. Navigators plot their positions by assuming a current location and comparing it to the actual measured positions of celestial bodies. With substantial help from complex mathematics, these celestial positions are reduced to an absolute — or near-absolute — location, provided the navigator has made no errors in calculation. In the author's own words, "In proving yourself wrong, you prove something else: exactly where you are."¹ Life is a great experiment, a journey of exploration. Like Gerard's sextants, tables, and charts, there are specific signposts to follow and specific methods to be employed. Yet, in our own minds, nothing is ever quite certain. We have an idea of where we want to go, but all we ever truly know is that we are somewhere — and it is that somewhere that is real and absolute.

Celestial navigation sits at the intersection of precise science and practiced artistry. Navigators must master complex mathematics to reduce celestial observations into a usable position fix, yet they must also exercise judgment and intuition when conditions are imperfect or calculations ambiguous. Gerard's essay captures this duality: the formulas are exacting, but the human being applying them is fallible, uncertain, and always in motion.

Navigation as Science and Art

This tension — between the absolute truth the mathematics promises and the imperfect knowledge the navigator actually holds — is central to the essay's meaning. Proving one's assumed position wrong is not failure; it is the very mechanism by which the truth is found.

The author's use of language conveys the sense of life as an act of navigation. Gerard makes heavy use of technical jargon and informs the reader of the various formulae employed in calculating a craft's position at sea. Many of the descriptions are deliberately confusing. Gerard's extended discourse on the skills of Royal Navy captains, and on the importance of those captains to the average sailor — regardless of whether the captain was personally liked — reveals both the significance and the inscrutability of celestial knowledge.²

Language, Jargon, and the Sublime

The profound does not necessarily reveal itself in the everyday. Still, a little knowledge helps stave off "the Imp of the Perverse."³ Thus, the reader is led to explore his or her own relationship with the larger world. The mathematics of navigation is like the code that governs the universe. Each of us must undertake a study of this difficult subject and hope to understand it as best we can. The way may be difficult; it may be fraught with high seas. We may see lights that we mistake for those of another small boat, but which actually belong to a freighter large enough to swamp us — yet we continue on, braving the unknown.⁴

Each adventure is another port on the voyage toward greater and more complete knowledge of the principles that guide our lives. The more we learn, the more we come to see that each individual piece of information fits together. Like the navigator, we assemble the pieces of a picture and use those pieces to create a chart that will, with luck, guide ourselves and others.

Conclusion

Gerard, Philip. "Adventures in Celestial Navigation." In In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.