Goodbye to Cy Zoerner

Garrison Frost writes in The Aesthetic (The South Bay's Journal of Arts and Ideas) of attending a memorial service last week for Cy Zoerner, a contributor to his site who died Feb. 24. He calls Zoerner "one of the South Bay's great writers and thinkers" and links to a piece Zoerner wrote last year on the disappearance at sea of solo sailor Frank Guernsey, a friend. It began:

The question "Why do people do what they do?" is endlessly fascinating, perhaps because its answer might tell us why we do what we do. For centuries philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, humanists, and more recently behavioral scientists have pondered the question.

Most fascinating of all is the mystery of singlehanding. WHY? Why do people sail off to suffer isolation and loneliness in an alien and hostile environment? Why do they turn their backs on human kind and human comforts?