This entire page consists of Straka romanticizing an enormous storm sweeping over the ship.

The key things to pick up on from this is first the incredible descriptive detail that Straka goes into.  He describes that “sinister black bar of storm-cloud is rushing toward them from the south-east–it was nowhere, and then purling blackly with jaw-dropping velocity, and now it is here” (62).  By reading this bit we can imagine S, staring at this gigantic storm absolutely encapsulated in its power, not able to move.  The beauty that comes out from this terrifying attack speaks to S’s feelings on death.  He is a coward who will not fight, will not hide, but instead watch and enjoy his death.  Everything has gotten so terrible, that death has become beautiful for S and this “stroboscopic bursts of light” are freezing this beautiful image for him.

During all of this we have the “monkey launch[ing] istself down for the deck and rac[ing] for the hatch before a sailor slams it shut.  Continuing from the previous notion that the monkey is S’s feelings, it makes no sense why S did not do the same.  S may be terrified of the storm in a way, but he does not have enough wherewithal to actually flee.

In addition to this the novel has references to both the “western sky” and “south east winds” (62).  One way to examine the Western Sky mentioning is to see it as an allusion to the loan company.  This would be the second financial company mentioned in the last few pages, signifying Straka clearly had some message for these big inequitable companies.  Stemming from his criticisms of the Haymarket Massacre and the Triangle Fire, we can assume he did not have positive views of these financial firms.  However, we can also look at the original reference in a slightly different way.  We could see this more of as a battle of the West versus the east.  While the east is working hard, the west is simply being lit up beautifully.  As we know the west controls much of the power in our world, and perhaps Straka did not approve of this.

On a slightly different note, we can find another reference to the Old Quarter in the margins as Jen says it reminds her of Barcelona.  When googling “Old Quarter Barcelona” we come up with the Gothic Quarter, in which Picasso lived and worked.  The Old Quarter must have had a lot of culture and influence on S as the first place he showed up, in a way we could see S’s abstract styles fitting in with Picasso’s paintings.

Finally, this page reminds Eric of his Uncle and his death on his sailing trip, similarly to S, it seems that Eric was too scared to actually help his Uncle on this trip, thus he quit.

There is a lot of mystery on this page, however very little that is for sure.  In order to solidify any of this review the pages mentioning Straka’s distaste for large companies.