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That the Sea is so Large


Winslow Homer
Breton fisherman's Prayer


Larry gave me a space in his steel erection company to build a boat. Early in the construction, one of the workers came to inspect "the boat".  

"I would not," the steelworker said to me, "go out in any boat I had built myself."  

 Anyone who has ever gotten into a boat for the first time, whether a small skiff at the edge of a lake, or aboard a ship as large as a city, thinks about the thin skin of the boat, and how far down is the bottom of the sea.  Even when the sea is flat and the sun is shining.  

 "I should not want to build a house," Friedrich Nietzsche said, "but were I to do so, I would build it right down into the sea.  I should like to have some secrets in common with that beautiful monster."

 It is not just the sea.  The sea, here, is almost just a metaphor for everything large and awful and lovely that holds our lives.  Try, for a moment, to think what it means to say that the universe is fourteen billion years old.  Try to think what it means that what we see from that time is not really there anymore; that the light from the nearest star--our sun--takes eight minutes to get to earth; that if (as it cannot) it were suddenly to grow dark, we would not know about it for eight minutes.  And that most of the light in the sky has been coming this way for billions of years.  

 And that a human life is so short.  So small.  Perhaps by reason of strength, four score years.  It is the human condition to recognize what it is to be small; that the sea is large; that it will do what it will.

 It is not just the size, or the age.  It is what we know, and do not know.  It is feeling the earth shake like jello, and hiding in a closet when the sky comes raging.  It is being helplessly caught up in war; someone else's war.  It is falling in love, and watching it drift away.  It is growing old.  It is wishing, and knowing it will not be.  It is crying out to all the gods when the sea rises like a monster, or when the tornado shreds every security except a hole in the ground.  

 When we feel especially helpless, when even the reasons for what is happening are not clear, we invent reasons.  "There must be some reason!  There must be some way to understand!"

 Sometimes when we do that, we do make sense of things, and the sea seems not quite so large.  Sometimes we invent madness; utter madness.  We create imaginary minds with obscure reasons for what is happening.  We imagine conspiracies and absurdities, gods and plots:  anything, something!  

 It is clearest in politics and religion, where people gather precisely to make sense to things, and to understand and control things.  Preachers blame hurricanes and tornadoes and droughts and floods on . . . on God who is angry that gays are getting married, or that people are not going to church, or that the kids are making love without getting married first.  Politicians explain that welfare mothers are bankrupting entire economies, and that Obama plans to set up "death panels".  Or that Barack Obama's parents planted phony birth notices in Hawaiian newspapers when he was born as part of a plan to make him president.  Maybe that half of the Democrats in Congress and a quarter of the Republicans are Communists, or that they are immigrants from Bolivia or Guatemala or Arkansas.  

 "That explains everything!  Why the market crashed, why the CIA or the Defense Department or the Secretary of Arts and Crafts planned the attack on 9/11, or how we got fluoride into our water."

 There must be some way to make sense of things!

 Paranoias are not that far away from sensibility.  Both are born in the clear recognition that the sea is so large, and our boat is so small.   












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