Aashisha traces writers’ obsession with the oldest ironist of all — the boundless, beloved, and beautiful sea.
The sea is a fascinating concept, not only because water makes up three-fourths of the planet as well as the human body (thanks, fourth-grade writer mind) but because it is timeless. Literally without time. Sure, the creatures of the sea probably have kept time and evolved from the shapeless amoeba to the first trilobites and jellyfish for over 3.5 billion years before land even came into the picture around 500 million years ago. But the sea is the real Khaleesi, endlessly commanding, inspiring writers since forever. Was it Homer who first set Odysseus adrift on the waves? If you are wondering why the literature writer is suddenly turning to the history of the earth, wait. I have some books from my library to prove my point.
When Ahab chases Moby Dick, he thinks he’s defying God, fate, or the monstrous indifference of nature. But Herman Melville assiduously implies through pages and pages of prose and reverence for the white whale that what Mr. Ahab is really defying is his own smallness.
“All visible objects are but as pasteboard masks.”
His harpoon pierces through the mask and hits water. Does the sea care? It never has. It never will. And the longest existing sea creatures have absorbed a little of its nature. They too are oblivious. And in their oblivion and indifference, they win by default.
A century later, Ernest Hemingway’s Santiago goes out to sea to prove his vitality. The sea is his last sparring partner, and like all sparring partners, it teaches through defeat. When the sharks strip his marlin to bone, Santiago tells himself,
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
The line is meant to sound triumphant, but it isn’t. It’s a line of exhaustion and acceptance. Typical humans congratulating themselves for losing beautifully. The sea (what an ironist, by the way) lets him live just long enough to make that speech.
What kind of an Ironist are You?
Then there was Virginia Woolf, listening to the steady wash of waves outside the Ramsays’ summer house in To The Lighthouse, writing “The sea without a stain on it like a mirror reflecting the light of the sky,” even as Mrs. Ramsay fades and the house collapses into dust. The waves keep washing over the land, indifferent to war and death, absorbing love and loss. Like time itself, tireless and unjudging, stripping memory clean.
But we rarely like the sea’s blankness or the fact that it couldn’t care less. We try to put meanings on it, assigning it moods (angry, calm, fickle, maternal) and build metaphors out of it: the sea of love, the sea of faith, the sea of despair. We pretend it teaches us lessons. The sea, though, keeps doing what it has always done: rise and fall, devour and forget.
Matthew Arnold, watching the waves of Dover Beach, heard in them “the eternal note of sadness.” He thought the retreating tide of faith was humanity’s tragedy. It probably is. Or, at least, it mocks our desire for permanence with its own endless repetition. It feels like the most consistent inconsistency on earth.
Writers have treated the sea as both a stage and a confession booth. Melville’s Ahab rages across it, Woolf’s Ramsays sail toward it, Hemingway’s old man rows into it with weary defiance. Each believes the sea offers something – truth, peace, absolution – but each finds instead an echo of their own restlessness. The sea, in fact, is so overwhelming that leaders have barely tried to conquer it. Instead, they try to wage wars on its much younger and far weaker sibling, the land. Writers like me shall wait for the day humanity tries to overtake the sea. That would be an interesting battle to witness.
