Long Day's Journey Into Night

Order the PBS American Experience documentary on Eugene O'Neill, and watch the whole thing. The following passage has the most meaning when you know the story behind it. But it also stands alone. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

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Narrator:
In the climactic fourth act of Long Day's Journey Into Night, in one of the most beautiful and quietly moving passages O'Neill ever wrote, Edmund struggles to put into words the ephemeral sense of connection with something larger that had sometimes come over him while at sea.

Performance, Robert Sean Leonard (Edmund):
I was on The Squarehead, square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free.

I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky. . . I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to life itself . . . To God, if you want to put it that way.

And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning.

[The following is said so wistfully, in such a quiet, understated way, that your eyes can't help but mist over.]

Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man. . . I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.

Robert Brustein:
Well, there's that beautiful moment in Long Day's Journey when Edmund begins to reflect on the time when he was at sea, and he found God, or what he thought was God in the quiet and the silence and the coming together of all the elements. And his father sits and wonders at this and says, "There's a touch of the poet in you." And he says, "No, I'm not a poet. I don't even have the makings."

Performance, Robert Sean Leonard (Edmund):
No...I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do. Well, it will be faithful realism at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.