The ship spotters do not respond to the objects of their enthusiasm with particular imagination. They traffic in statistics. Their energies are focused on logging dates and shipping speeds, recording turbine numbers and shaft lengths. They behave like a man who has fallen deeply in love and asks his companion if he might act on his emotions by measuring the distance between her elbow and her shoulder blade. But in converting a passion into a set of facts, the spotters are at least following a pattern with an established pedigree, most noticeable in academia, where an art historian, on being stirred to tears by the tenderness and serenity he detects in a work by a fourteenth-century Florentine painter, may end up writing a monograph, as irreproachable as it is bloodless, on the history of paint manufacture in the age of Giotto. It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved.