(Do I know where to find my own view of the sea?)
The following quote is from the ninth book in the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian, Treason's Harbour. By the end of this book, Captain of His Majesty's Navy Jack Aubrey is on his way home to England. He has no idea if he will get command of another ship ever again or if he'll be spending his time unemployed, 'on half-pay', or whether he will manage to escape economic ruin because of being tricked into bad investments.
He was eating his dinner not in the dining-cabin but right aft, sitting with his face to the great stern-window, so that on the far side of the glass and a biscuit-toss below the frigate's wake streamed away and away from him, dead white in the troubled green, so white that the gulls, poising and swooping over it, looked quite dingy. This was a sight that never failed to move him: the noble curve of shining panes, wholly unlike any landborne window, and then the sea in some one of its infinity of aspects; and the whole in silence, entirely to himself. If he spent the rest of his life on half-pay in a debtors' prison he would still have this, he reflected, eating the last of the Cephalonian cheese; and it was something over and above any reward he could possibly have contracted for. (p. 247)
He was eating his dinner not in the dining-cabin but right aft, sitting with his face to the great stern-window, so that on the far side of the glass and a biscuit-toss below the frigate's wake streamed away and away from him, dead white in the troubled green, so white that the gulls, poising and swooping over it, looked quite dingy. This was a sight that never failed to move him: the noble curve of shining panes, wholly unlike any landborne window, and then the sea in some one of its infinity of aspects; and the whole in silence, entirely to himself. If he spent the rest of his life on half-pay in a debtors' prison he would still have this, he reflected, eating the last of the Cephalonian cheese; and it was something over and above any reward he could possibly have contracted for. (p. 247)