Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

This passage is the famous opening of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel *Their Eyes Were Watching God* (1937). It functions as a thematic prologue before the narrative turns to Janie Crawford’s return to Eatonville and the townspeople’s gossip, setting up the book’s central concern with longing, agency, and the uneven fulfillment of desire. Written during the Harlem Renaissance era but rooted in Hurston’s anthropological attentiveness to Black Southern life and speech, the lines frame the story as a meditation on how people—especially women constrained by social expectations—wait for, pursue, or relinquish their “wishes” as time and circumstance press in.

Hurston uses the metaphor of distant ships to describe human desire: hopes appear tangible yet remain beyond reach, and different lives are defined by whether dreams arrive, recede, or are abandoned. The “Watcher” suggests a person who lives in anticipation rather than action, and “Time” becomes an active force that erodes aspiration through delay and disappointment. The closing sentence—“That is the life of men”—generalizes the condition, but in the novel it also sets up a contrast between passive waiting and Janie’s eventual insistence on lived experience. The imagery captures the tension between fate (tides, horizons) and will (turning one’s eyes away, choosing to act).