"Global Possibilities"

Committed to educating the public about solutions to our ecological, economic and political crises.

  • Home
  • About Us
    • Bios
    • Educational Archives
      • Donald W. Aitken Keynote Presentation
    • Links
  • Film & Video
    • “Who’s Got The Power?”
    • Video
  • Casey Coates Danson
    • Design Projects
    • Casey Coates Danson Bio
  • Angels Unawares
    • US Homeless Sleeping Accommodation Directory
  • Topics
    • Activism
    • Architecture
    • Climate Change
    • Conferences
    • Design
    • Economy
    • Energy
    • Environment
    • Food
    • Fracking
    • Health
    • Media
    • News
    • Oceans
    • Politics
    • Sustainability
    • How To Be Green
    • Visionaries
    • Water
  • Contact Us
Home » Uncategorized » The ocean and the meaning of life, James Baldwin on love, the illusion of choice and the paradox of freedom, Borges and the blues of knowing ourselves

The ocean and the meaning of life, James Baldwin on love, the illusion of choice and the paradox of freedom, Borges and the blues of knowing ourselves

Jun 13, 2021 by Casey Coates Danson

[Translate]
6 of 62,004

Print all
In new window
Inbox

Brain Pickings by Maria Popova <newsletter@brainpickings.org> Unsubscribe

6:01 AM (6 hours ago)

to casey

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. View it in full. If a friend forwarded it to you and you’d like your very own newsletter, subscribe here — it’s free. Need to modify your subscription? You can change your email address or unsubscribe.
Brain Pickings

WelcomeHello casey danson! This is the weekly email digest of the daily online journal Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. If you missed last week’s edition — music, matter, and the mind; how to get over rejection; the chemistry and culture of how we see color — you can catch up right here. If my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a donation – for a decade and a half, I have spent tens of thousands of hours, made many personal sacrifices, and invested tremendous resources in Brain Pickings, which remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: THANK YOU.

The Ocean and the Meaning of Life

This essay is adapted from Figuring.

figuring_jacket_final.jpgIn June of 1952, the United States Fish & Wildlife Service received a letter of resignation from its most famous marine biologist. On the line requesting the reason for resignation, she had stated plainly: “To devote my time to writing.” But she was also leaving for the freedom to use her public voice as an instrument of change, awakening the world’s ecological conscience with her bold open letters holding the government accountable for its exploitation of nature.

Fifteen years earlier, at age twenty-nine, Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) had gotten her start at the lowest rungs of the government agency as a field aide hired at $6.50 an hour. Wading through tide pools and annual marine census reports as a junior aquatic biologist, she had found her voice as a writer with an uncommon gift for walking the teeming shoreline between the scientific and the poetic. In an unexampled essay that eventually bloomed into The Sea Around Us, which won her the National Book Award, she had invited the human imagination undersea, into a world then more mysterious than the Moon. Now, forty-five and finally free from the day-job by which she had been supporting her mother, her sister, and the young nephew she adopted and raised as her son after her sister’s death, Carson set out to fulfill her childhood dream of living by the ocean.

rachelcarson_undersea.jpg?resize=680%2C398Rachel Carson

After searching along the New England coast, she fell in love with West Southport — a picturesque island in Maine, nestled among evergreens and oaks in the estuary of the Sheepscot River, where seals frequented the beach and whales billowed by as though torn from the pages of her beloved Melville. With her book royalties, she bought a plot of land on which to build a cottage. In a touching testament to her orientation to the natural world, she felt deeply uncomfortable thinking of herself as its “owner” — a “strange and inappropriate word” — of this “perfectly magnificent piece of Maine shoreline.” There, she would soon meet her soul mate, whose love would bolster Carson’s moral courage in catalyzing the environmental movement; there, she would compose her next book, dedicating it to her beloved Dorothy for having gone down with her “into the low-tide world” and “felt its beauty and its mystery.”

The Edge of the Sea was an ambitious guide to the seashore — the place where Carson found “a sense of the unhurried deliberation of earth processes that move with infinite leisure, with all eternity at their disposal”; the strange and wondrous boundary the ocean-loving Whitman had once extolled as “that suggesting, dividing line, contact, junction… blending the real and ideal, and each made portion of the other.”

The book was also an admonition against what we stand to lose — writing in the early 1950s, Carson noted the systematically documented and “well recognized” fact of global climate change. But was primarily a celebration, for that is always the most effective instrument of admonition — a celebration of what we have and what we are, an ode to “how that marvelous, tough, vital, and adaptable something we know as LIFE has come to occupy one part of the sea world and how it has adjusted itself and survived despite the immense, blind forces acting upon it from every side.”

hasuikawase1.jpg?resize=680%2C1014Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)

Inevitably, in telling the story of life, the book takes on an existential undertone, rendered symphonic under Carson’s poetic pen. Watching the fog engulf the rocks beneath her study window as the night tide rolls in, she considers the totality of being, which the world’s oceans contour and connect:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngHearing the rising tide, I think how it is pressing also against other shores I know — rising on a southern beach where there is no fog, but a moon edging all the waves with silver and touching the wet sands with lambent sheen, and on a still more distant shore sending its streaming currents against the moonlit pinnacles and the dark caves of the coral rock.

Then in my thoughts these shores, so different in their nature and in the inhabitants they support, are made one by the unifying touch of the sea. For the differences I sense in this particular instant of time that is mine are but the differences of a moment, determined by our place in the stream of time and in the long rhythms of the sea. Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality — earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.

greatwave_hokusai.jpg?resize=680%2C457The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Hokusai, 1831. (Available as a print and as a face mask, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

The year of Carson’s death, as Dorothy scattered her ashes into the rocking bay, James Baldwin would echo these existential undertones in his poetic insistence that “nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever… the sea does not cease to grind down rock.” Carson — still alive, still islanded for a mortal moment in the ocean of ongoingness — adds:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngOn all these shores there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all that has gone before; of the sea’s eternal rhythms — the tides, the beat of surf, the pressing rivers of the currents — shaping, changing, dominating; of the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean current, from past to unknown future.

[…]

Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of the barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us — a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself.

yaggi_nature_sm.jpg?resize=680%2C460Art from Geographical Portfolio — Comprising Physical, Political, Geological, and Astronomical Geography by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

As The Edge of the Sea alighted in the world, critical praise and honors came cascading, trailed by invitations for lectures and acceptance speeches. Always uncomfortable with attention and public appearances, Carson became even more selective, prioritizing women’s associations and nonprofit cultural institutions over glamorous commercial stages. When she did speak, her words became almost a consecration, as in a speech she delivered before a convocation of librarians:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngWhen we go down to the lowest of the low tide lines and look down into the shallow waters, there’s all the excitement of discovering a new world. Once you have entered such a world, its fascination grows and somehow you find your mind has gained a new dimension, a new perspective — and always thereafter you find yourself remember[ing] the beauty and strangeness and wonder of that world — a world that is as real, as much a part of the universe, as our own.

rachelcarson_1951.jpg?resize=680%2C338Rachel Carson, 1951

Savor more of Carson’s lyrical reverence for the sea and the strange wonder of life in Figuring. Couple this fragment with a stunning illustrated celebration of our water world based on Indian mythology, then revisit Carson’s life-tested wisdom on writing and the loneliness of creative work, the story of how her writing sparked the environmental movement, and Neil Gaiman’s poetic tribute to her legacy.

Related Posts

  • OUR WORK GET INVOLVED ABOUT Search Back to All Blog Posts Utah Water Deal Siphons Colorado River Tributary

    Posted on Aug 9, 2022

  • History as Freedom by Joe Costello

    Posted on Dec 3, 2021

  • Like our human elders, trees should be treated with respect

    Posted on Nov 9, 2021

  • The scientists fighting to save the ocean’s most important carbon capture system

    Posted on Jul 6, 2021

Tags

  • Environment
  • Oceans

Share This

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe to receive new blogposts


 

Contact Us!

Donate to Global Possibilities

Recent Posts

  • Trump’s team takes aim at a major climate rule

Purchase – ANGELS UNAWARES

Angels Unawares Awarded Outstanding Book of the Year – Most Original Concept for 2019 by Independent Publisher Book Awards!

Image result for independent publishing awards

Archives

  • June 2025
  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • March 2025
  • February 2025
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015

Donate to Global Possibilities

Follow Us!

Follow Us on FacebookFollow Us on TwitterFollow Us on LinkedIn

Adsense

google.com, pub-2848125826401092, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress

العربية العربية česky česky dansk dansk Deutsch Deutsch español español فارسی فارسی français français עברית עברית हिन्दी हिन्दी italiano italiano 日本語 日本語 한국어 한국어 Nederlands Nederlands norsk norsk polski polski português português русский русский svenska svenska ภาษาไทย ภาษาไทย tiếng Việt tiếng Việt ייִדיש ייִדיש 中文 (简体) 中文 (简体) 中文 (繁體) 中文 (繁體) powered byGoogle