A Reminder of Eternity

Living near Northampton, which is almost as far from the sea in England as you can get, my experience of the sea is a rare treat. So I read this week's quotation, by German novelist Thomas Mann, with a certain amount of wistfulness:  "The sea is not a landscape, it is the experience of eternity."

I absolutely see what he means. When I do see the sea, my favourite thing to do is to sit and watch it, as the waves move up the shore and down again, in an endless rhythm. Like breathing. I can almost imagine that the waves are the breath of the sea, marking time for us.

I know they're not, that it's all to do with the pull of the moon, but sometimes I prefer to ignore the science and appreciate the poetry in motion that the sea represents. When my best friend and I went to Orkney for a week, back in July, we sat by the sea one day and these words came to my mind:

The small, polite waves

shimmy up the shore;

curtsey,

and then recede.

Below us, a

liver and white spaniel

poofles happily, tail wagging,

exploring the tideline

with questing nose.

I know that the sea has many moods and is to be respected, not taken for granted. But there is an eternal quality about it. It puts me in mind of one of my favourite quotes from Tom Stoppard's play, Travesties:  "It is this complete absence of bellicosity, coupled with an ostentatious punctuality of public clocks, that gives the place its reassuring air of permanence. Switzerland, one instinctively feels, will not go away. Nor will it turn into somewhere else."

Of course, this permanence of the sea, the sense of its being unchanging, eternal, always there, always going in and out, in and out is, sadly, an illusion. We know from the climate scientists that the polar ice caps are melting, that sea levels are rising. All of which is going to have a terrible effect on our planet. We all, as individuals and as a society, a civilisation, have a duty to do something about it before it is too late...