"So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more."

I found that quotation inscribed inside the cover of one of my collegiate notebooks, written probably during some exam week, without a reference.

It's a potentially useful quote, so today I looked it up and found this at Angelfire:

"And what if the powers above do wreck me out on the wine dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering and I shall steel it to endure that too. For in my day I have had many bitter and shattering experiences in war and on the stormy seas. So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more."

"The speaker is Ulysses; the place, the island of the nymph-goddess Calypso, who has held Ulysses captive for seven years during his trouble-filled voyage home; the time, the morning when Calypso, on the orders of Zeus, father of the gods, has told Ulysses that he may go, but that much misery still awaits him before he will see his wife, Penelope...

Of all his qualities, the one that makes Ulysses unforgettable is not so much his capacity for success as his intense humanity and his intrepidity in the face of failure - and failure was his frequent companion, no less terrifying because so often sent by forces he could not control: the capricious and hostile gods from Olympus...

The Ulyssean life is bound many times to encounter failure. Its practitioners do not, of course, court failure -- courting failure is the domain of the death-wishers, not the life-wishers - but neither do they pretend that it is nonexistent. The Ulyssean life is possible in spite of failure, in the midst of failure. Furthermore, the Ulysseans have often known enough failure in their earlier lives to recognize it for what it is: sometimes the result of their own human misjudgments and missteps, but sometimes-many times-the result of circumstances, the result of Fate..."

The essay goes on to cite examples of modern-day people with Ulyssean lives and temperaments (Robert Louis Stevenson, Karen Blixen, Auguste Renoir and others).