My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown. Such visions and desires--for they amounted to desires--... I regarded . . . as prophetic glimpses of a destiny which I felt myself in a measure bound to fulfill.
--Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 57.
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