The Paris Review

The Ocean

   One only needs to give the ocean some thought and it becomes describable as a street of houses:

   To point out the features of the waves one has observed, or that one may imagine having observed; such as, that this moves forward with the curve of a woman's slackly muscled upper arm, when flexed, while the next displays a broader sweep that seems to amend or qualify the message of the first;

   To proceed, then, to those more extensive forms invisible to viewers stationed on the shore, knowable only to those who make their home upon it, as the varying convexities of hills are known to the feet of their inhabitants, not to the racing eyes of truckers on the turnpike far away—to the swells, their endless amassings and fallings away, their seeming immensity;

   To agree, nevertheless, that on a truly oceanic scale such forms, the largest apprehensible to sense, count for less than a wrinkle on the ocean's smooth bright face; that to the moon, which is their proximate cause, nothing changes on that face as it for ever turns and turns away;

   Let us confine ourselves, on this account, to our own sphere of vision, wherein all analogies are, literally, homespun—as though our theme had been, in fact, a street of houses, for what can be said of streets or houses on a global scale except that their number must be immense and their extent unthinkable? Returning, therefore, to our station on the shore, let us admire the colors that a given moment, at a given height, may yield:

   The fissioning, amoebic blues and greens that lull the inattentive fisherman, defeat the wistful watercolorist;

   The almost-blackness interleaved with these;

   The skein of jittery white lines that seem raw light, quanta all but broken loose (these few threads remaining) from accidents of form and color;

   And, ah! the rose enamelings of sunset, the fleshy washes of dawn when all ocean has become one single worshipful limb demanding to be mythologized;

   And then the dance among these basic possibilities, each curve of wave engendering, in conjunction with an angle of the light, some necessary and sufficient charm;

   But beyond charm there is utility: let us, accordingly, appraise the ocean's varied uses, as: 

   That it supplies our stores with fish (concerning which we might here intercalate heroic catalogues of their generic types, together with vast menus suggesting how each may best be cooked and dressed);

   That it provides a unique, convenient form of transportation and a bridge broad enough for entire cultures to cross without colliding, as land-neighbors do (though not unfailingly: witness the sequence from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima);

   Progressing beyond utility, it would be well to note the ocean's often dangerous periodicities, its rip-tides, whirlpools, tsunamis, hurricanes, and grand bashings of waves on cliffs;

   A proper appreciation of which, in even their simplest forms, will require some knowledge of the ocean's inner mechanisms, the liquid clockwork ordering its waves, the ponderous hidden forms of streams and currents;  

   And now, finding ourselves, as it were, immersed, we may choose to observe the simple, satisfying destinies of all its denizens, which are, amazingly, not merely warm ovals of food on our round plates, but living beings supremely capable of, well, swimming anyhow, and of being anthropomorphized and, thereby, loved (though never, it must be allowed, to the degree our fellow mammals may be loved, since fish are such egotists);

   Let us, at last, say what may be well surmised of the ocean's obscurest depths, and speculate about its origins, which must be, in a sense, our own.

   Do this, and the ocean that will then exist within your mind will be a worthy brother to the ocean you surveyed a year ago from its pebbly and often so-expensive shore,

   On which the light played with such virtuosity,

   In which you swam until you had become too cold.