Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant

The expression “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” serves as the epigraph to the whale-watching chapter, where it places reciprocal vision at the center of an encounter otherwise shaped by fog, observation, and the limits of knowledge.

Placement and Attribution

The chapter opens with the heading “The Whale Watch,” followed by the question and its attribution to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Its position gives the line the force of a threshold: before the boat leaves Macmillan Wharf, the reader is invited to consider what kind of seeing a whale watch might make possible.

Seeing and Its Limits

The passage sets the epigraph’s brief “instant” of mutual vision against the naturalist Dennis Minsky’s accumulating survey forms. He is preparing another sheaf of data, pieces in a jigsaw that will never be completed. The contrast does not dismiss observation; it places the careful gathering of facts beside a more fragile hope of encounter, one that cannot be reduced to a finished record.

The Whale Watch as Encounter

As Captain Mark Delumba steers into thick mist and the land disappears from view, the boat’s familiar course becomes newly uncertain. The epigraph’s emphasis on looking through another’s eyes gives this departure a reciprocal possibility, while the chapter leaves that possibility open rather than claiming that it has been achieved. Its miracle remains momentary: a way of imagining connection across the distance between watcher and whale.