Seas And Oceans

"That centre was the Mediterranean; which was not so much a piece of water as a world. But it was a world with something of the character of such a water; for it became more and more a place of unification in which the streams of strange and very diverse cultures met. The Nile and the Tiber alike flow into the Mediterranean; so did the Egyptian and the Etrurian alike contribute to a Mediterranean civilisation. The glamour of the great sea spread indeed very far inland, and the unity was felt among the Arabs alone in the deserts and the Galls beyond the Northern hills. But the gradual building up of a common culture running round all the coasts of this inner sea is the main business of antiquity. As will be seen, it was sometimes a bad business as well as a good business. In that orbis terrarum or circle of lands there were the extremes of evil and of piety, there were contrasted races and still more contrasted religions. It was the scene of an endless struggle between Asia and Europe from the flight of the Persian ships at Salamis to the flight of the Turkish ships at Lepanto. It was the scene, as will be more especially suggested later, of a supreme spiritual struggle between the two types of paganism, confronting each other in the Latin and the Phoenician cities; in the Roman forum and the Punic mart. It was the world of war and peace, the world of good and evil, the world of all that matters most; with a respect to the Aztecs and the Mongols of the Far East, they did not matter as the Mediterranean tradition mattered and still matters. Between it and the Far East there were, of course, interesting cults and conquests of various kinds, more or less in touch with it, and in proportion as they were so intelligible also to us. The Persians came riding in to make an end of Babylon; and we are told in a Greek story how these barbarians learned to draw the bow and tell the truth. Alexander the great Greek marched with his Macedonians into the sunrise, and brought back strange birds coloured like the sunrise clouds and strange flowers and jewels from the gardens and treasuries of nameless kings. Islam went eastward into that world and made it partly imaginable to us; precisely because Islam itself was born in that circle of lands that fringed our own ancient and ancestral sea. In the Middle Ages the empire of the Moguls increased its majesty without losing its mystery; the Tartars conquered China and the Chinese apparently took very little notice of them. All these things are interesting in themselves; but it is impossible to shift the centre of gravity to the inland spaces of Asia from the inland sea of Europe. When all is said, if there were nothing in the world but what was said and done and written and built in the lands lying round the Mediterranean, it would still be in all the most vital and valuable things the world in which we live. When that southern culture spread to the north-west it produced many very wonderful things; of which doubtless we ourselves are the most wonderful. When it spread thence to colonies and new countries, it was still the same culture so long as it was culture at all. But round that little sea like a lake were the things themselves, apart from all extensions and echoes and commentaries on the things; the Republic and the Church; the Bible and the heroic epics; Islam and Israel and the memories of the lost empires; Aristotle and the measure of all things. It is because the first light upon this world is really light, the daylight in which we are still walking to-day, and not merely the doubtful visitation of strange stars, that I have begun here with noting where that light first falls on the towered cities of the eastern Mediterranean."

"At certain periods of the evening and the morning the blue of the Mediterranean surpasses all conception or description. It is the most intense and wonderful colour, I do believe, in all nature."

"Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull’d by the coil of his crystàlline streams,Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! ..."

"How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by Storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country."

"The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow stream’d off free: We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, ’Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea!All in a hot and copper sky The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon.Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion, As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean,Water, water, every where And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink."

"The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature. It was very far inland that I caught the first smell of the Pacific. When one has been long at sea, the smell of land reaches far out to greet one. And the same it true when one has been long inland."

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

"You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? [...] They say it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life: a warm place with no memory."

"When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue.There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead’s veins swelled like overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull, “Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!”"

"The Atlantic Ocean was somethin' then. Yes, you should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days."

"I think the difficulty the Enlightenment view of the world encountered very early on is that human beings struggle to see the Atlantic in a completely rational way. It’s not that it’s just a vast quantity of water: it’s also a vital part of the planet’s ecosystem, it’s probably the most important determinant of the weather in Britain… If we thought rationally about the Atlantic in the way that my parents encouraged me to think, we wouldn’t currently be despoiling it with the effluents of our industry and fishing its fauna to the brink of extinction. We would treasure it."

"The lonely billows of the Atlantic, where every breeze speaks of courage and liberty."

"It is poetically remarked, a thousand times has it been repeated, but history proves it without a metaphor by the experience of centuries, that The Trident of Neptune is the Sceptre of the World."

"Now Neptune's sullen month appears, The angry night cloud swells with tears, And savage storms infuriate driven, Fly howling in the face of heaven! Now, now, my friends, the gathering gloom With roseate rays of wine illume: And while our wreaths of parsley spread Their fadeless foliage round our head, We'll hymn th' almighty power of wine, And shed libations on his shrine!"

"Over the mountains, And over the waves, Over the fountains, And under the graves; Over the floods that are deepest, Which do Neptune obey; Over the rocks that are steepest, Love will find out the way."

"'His nature is too noble for the world': He would not flatter Neptune for his trident, Or Jove for's power to thunder."

"Firstly, I must say, that I personally believe that Russia is not by any means without faults. But the amount of anti-Russian propaganda in our media today is a throwback to the Cold War era. We must ask the question: Is this leading to more arms, a bigger NATO? Possibly to challenge large powers in the Middle East and Asia, as we see the US approaching the South China seas, and NATO Naval games taking place in the Black Sea. Missile compounds are being erected in Romania, Poland and other ex-Soviet countries, while military games are set up in Scandinavia close to the Russian border to practice for a cold climate war scenario."

"It is a common concern of the international community that China tries to change the situation and increase tensions in the South China Sea by carrying out extensive and rapid land reclamation, building its base in the region and utilizing it for military purposes. We have deep concerns over such actions and want to re-emphasize that Japan cannot accept (them)"

"Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers “is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today,”"

"I've been reflecting on what the past eight years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one—a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early '80s, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, "Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man." A small moment with a big meaning, a moment the sailor, who wrote it in a letter, couldn't get out of his mind. And, when I saw it, neither could I. Because that's what it was to be an American in the 1980s. We stood, again, for freedom. I know we always have, but in the past few years the world again—and in a way, we ourselves—rediscovered it. It's been quite a journey this decade, and we held together through some stormy seas. And at the end, together, we are reaching our destination. The fact is, from Grenada to the Washington and Moscow summits, from the recession of '81 to '82, to the expansion that began in late '82 and continues to this day, we've made a difference. The way I see it, there were two great triumphs, two things that I'm proudest of. One is the economic recovery, in which the people of America created—and filled—19 million new jobs. The other is the recovery of our morale. America is respected again in the world and looked to for leadership."

"Tide flowing is feared, for many a thing, Great danger to such as be sick, it doth bring; Sea ebb, by long ebbing, some respite doth give, And sendeth good comfort, to such as shall live."

"The western tide crept up along the sand, And o'er and o'er the sand, And round and round the sand, As far as eye could see The rolling mist came down and hid the land: And never home came she."

"I saw the long line of the vacant shore, The sea-weed and the shells upon the sand, And the brown rocks left bare on every hand, As if the ebbing tide would flow no more."

"There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds, in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."

"The tide rises, the tide falls, The twilight darkens, the curlew calls; * * * * * * The little waves, with their soft, white hands, Efface the footprints in the sands, And the tide rises, the tide falls."

"All night the thirsty beach has listening lain With patience dumb, Counting the slow, sad moments of her pain; Now morn has come, And with the morn the punctual tide again."

"Tide goes in, tide goes out, never a miscommunication. You can't explain that."

"The punctual tide draws up the bay, With ripple of wave and hiss of spray."

"Rocked in the cradle of the deep, I lay me down in peace to sleep."

"I send thee a shell from the ocean-beach; But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech. Hold to thine ear And plain thou'lt hear Tales of ships."

"In chambers deep, Where waters sleep, What unknown treasures pave the floor."

"We follow and race In shifting chase, Over the boundless ocean-space! Who hath beheld when the race begun? Who shall behold it run?"

"Thou wert before the Continents, before The hollow heavens, which like another sea Encircles them and thee, but whence thou wert, And when thou wast created, is not known, Antiquity was young when thou wast old."

"Rari nantes in gurgite vasto."

"A frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean."

"Deep calleth unto deep."

"And Thou, vast Ocean! on whose awful face Time's iron feet can print no ruin trace."

"A life on the ocean wave! A home on the rolling deep; Where the scattered waters rave, And the winds their revels keep!"

"The land is dearer for the sea, The ocean for the shore."

"Quoth the Ocean, "Dawn! O fairest, clearest, Touch me with thy golden fingers bland; For I have no smile till thou appearest For the lovely land.""

"Past are three summers since she first beheld The ocean; all around the child await Some exclamation of amazement here: She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased, Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?"

"Distinct as the billows, yet one as the sea."

"The always wind-obeying deep."

"The ocean and the wind and the stars and the moon will all teach you many things."

"There's oceans in between us, but that's not very far."

"Ocean man, take me by the hand. Lead me to the land that you understand, ocean man."

"It's just hard, all right, because I'm a little fish in a big pond. A really big pond. The ocean."

"He maketh the deep to boil like a pot."

"But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue; * * * * * Shake one, and it awakens; then apply Its polished lips to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there."

"Rich and various gems inlay The unadorned bosom of the deep."