Tidal Zone Quotes

Stories have endings; that's why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth.

Suddenly, you will stop, you and me and all of us. Your lungs will rest at last and the electric pulse in your pulse will vanish into the darkness from which it came. Put your fingers in your ears, lay your head on the pillow, listen to the footsteps of your blood. You are alive.

Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.

I personally don't like depressing subjects, people say, as if mortality is a lifestyle choice, disease and violence and sorrow a matter of taste.

There being no direct route to Savannah from Charleston, I followed a zigzagging course that took me through the tidal flatlands of the South Carolina low country. As I approached Savannah, the road narrowed to a two-lane blacktop shaded by tall trees. There was an occasional produce stand by the side of the road and a few cottages set into the foliage, but nothing resembling urban sprawl. The voice on the radio informed me that I had entered a zone called the Coastal Empire.

The fact that the tube worms have managed to live in the intertidal zone for perhaps millions of years is evidence of a sensitive adjustment of their way of life, on the one hand to conditions within the surrounding world of the rockweeds, on the other to vast tidal rhythms linked with the movements of earth, moon, and sun.

It's only, he said, that one doesn't like to think of one's grandchildren facing greater disadvantages than one's children. Well stop voting Tory, you prick, Emma did not say.

Suddenly, but not really. There is always a beginning.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

It is simply not possible to live in a state of acute fear and shock for more than a couple of weeks, and so the mind finds a path, a story, a way onwards. Shock is by definition transient, even when the shocking thing is here to stay.

In the lowest pools the Laminarias begin to appear, called variously the oarweeds, devil’s aprons, sea tangles, and kelps. The Laminarias belong to the brown algae, which flourish in the dimness of deep waters and polar seas. The horsetail kelp lives below the tidal zone with others of the group, but in deep pools also comes over the threshold, just above the line of the lowest tides. [...] To look into such a pool is to behold a dark forest, it’s foliage like the leaves of palm trees, the heavy stalks of the kelps also curiously like the trunks of palms. [...] One of these laminarian holdfasts is something like the roots of a forest tree, branching out, dividing, subdividing, in its very complexity a measure of the great seas that roar over this plant.

With every birth, a new death comes into being. With every love, a loss.

There is a large overlap between ordinary families and those to whom terrible things have happened. It is possible, necessary, to be both.

look, mate, it’s a job, the making of cakes and the washing of sheets, the coordination of laundry with PE lessons, the handling of the Christmas shopping and the girls’ dental appointments, and the fact that your wife does it on top of her paid work without you noticing does not make you clever.

May we forget. It's a pity that the things we learn in crisis are all to be found on fridge magnets and greeting cards: seize the day, savour the moment, tell your love— May we live long enough to despise clichés again, may we heal enough to take for granted sky and water and light, because the state of blind gratitude for breath and blood is not a position of intelligence.

I started to empty the dishwasher and then remembered that there was an alternative to my thoughts and turned on the radio. There had been more bombs in the places where there are bombs. Children had died. No one had started CPR and called an ambulance, no one had rushed to them with adrenaline and oxygen and a defibrillator, no one was piecing together what had happened. There had been bombs and children had died.

You keep going as everyone always keeps going, because an alternative has not been offered.

looking as always for food and mischief

The child was a girl, but the most important thing about her was that she was herself. She was someone new, someone who had not been before and so, like all babies, she was a revelation.

Although try this: if you could know what is going to happen, if you could know the lives and deaths of your partner and your kids and yourself, if you could know their loves and losses, triumphs and failures, sicknesses and last moments, would you? No. You think you want a story, you think you want an ending, but you don't. You want life. You want disorder and ignorance and uncertainty.

He came in the end, as he must, to the other coast, over the state line and well north of where he'd thought he was going, to a place where the Pacific Ocean ended on a white beach under dark pines and there were mussel shells as big as his hand and driftwood logs taller than buildings, wider than a man's length. Swell that had been rising and running from the coast of Japan, from the other side of the planet, crashed day and night onto the sand below the group's cabins, as if he'd come at last to a place where he could hear the earth breathe. Even now, in August, it was cool here, the green breath of the old forest and the salt sea always on his face.

A few years back, I had a long session with a psychiatrist who was conducting a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on reporters working in war zones. At one point, he asked me: “How many bodies have you seen in your lifetime?” Without thinking for too long, I replied: “I’m not sure exactly. I've seen quite a few mass graves in Africa and Bosnia, and I saw a well crammed full of corpses in East Timor, oh and then there was Rwanda and Goma...” After a short pause, he said to me calmly: “Do you think that's a normal response to that question?” He was right. It wasn't a normal response. Over the course of their lifetime, most people see the bodies of their parents, maybe their grandparents at a push. Nobody else would have responded to that question like I did. Apart from my fellow war reporters, of course. When I met Marco Lupis nearly twenty years ago, in September 1999, we were stood watching (fighting the natural urge to divert our gaze) as pale, maggot-ridden corpses, decomposed beyond recognition, were being dragged out of the well in East Timor. Naked bodies shorn of all dignity. When Marco wrote to ask me to write the foreword to this book and relive the experiences we shared together in Dili, I agreed without giving it a second thought because I understood that he too was struggling for normal responses. That he was hoping he would find some by writing this book. While reading it, I could see that Marco shares my obsession with understanding the world, my compulsion to recount the horrors I have seen and witnessed, and my need to overcome them and leave them behind. He wants to bring sense to the apparently senseless. Books like this are important. Books written by people who have done jobs like ours. It's not just about conveying - be it in the papers, on TV or on the radio - the atrocities committed by the very worst of humankind as they are happening; it’s about ensuring these atrocities are never forgotten. Because all too often, unforgivably, the people responsible go unpunished. And the thing they rely on most for their impunity is that, with the passing of time, people simply forget. There is a steady flow of information as we are bombarded every day with news of the latest massacre, terrorist attack or humanitarian crisis. The things that moved or outraged us yesterday are soon forgotten, washed away by today's tidal wave of fresh events. Instead they become a part of history, and as such should not be forgotten so quickly. When I read Marco's book, I discovered that the people who murdered our colleague Sander Thoenes in Dili, while he was simply doing his job like the rest of us, are still at large to this day. I read the thoughts and hopes of Ingrid Betancourt just twenty-four hours before she was abducted and taken to the depths of the Colombian jungle, where she would remain captive for six long years. I read that we know little or nothing about those responsible for the Cambodian genocide, whose millions of victims remain to this day without peace or justice. I learned these things because the written word cannot be destroyed. A written account of abuse, terror, violence or murder can be used to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice, even though this can be an extremely drawn-out process during and after times of war. It still torments me, for example, that so many Bosnian women who were raped have never got justice and every day face the prospect of their assailants passing them on the street. But if I follow in Marco's footsteps and write down the things I have witnessed in a book, people will no longer be able to plead ignorance. That is why we need books like this one.

We are conditioned to look for justice in life and when it doesn’t appear, we tend to feel anger, anxiety or frustration. Actually, it would be equally productive to search for the fountain of youth, or some such myth. Justice does not exist. It never has, and it never will. The world is simply not put together that way. Robins eat worms. That’s not fair to the worms. Spiders eat flies. That’s not fair to the flies. Cougars kill coyotes. Coyotes kill badgers. Badgers kill mice. Mice kill bugs. Bugs...You have only to look at nature to realize there is no justice in the world. Tornadoes, floods, tidal waves, draughts are all unfair. It is a mythological concept, this justice business. The world and the people in it go on being unfair every day. You can choose to be happy or unhappy, but it has nothing to do with the lack of justice you see around you.

It seems no one is guaranteed a job anywhere anymore. These are troubled times for workers. The creeping sense that no one’s job is safe, even as the companies they work for are thriving, means the spread of fear, apprehension, and confusion. One sign of this growing unease: An American headhunting firm reported that more than half of callers making inquiries about jobs were still employed—but were so fearful of losing those jobs that they had already started to look for another.5 The day that AT&T began notifying the first of forty thousand workers to be laid off—in a year when its profits were a record $4.7 billion—a poll reported that a third of Americans feared that someone in their household would soon lose a job. Such fears persist at a time when the American economy is creating more jobs than it is losing. The churning of jobs—what economists euphemistically call “labor market flexibility”—is now a troubling fact of work life. And it is part of a global tidal wave sweeping through all the leading economies of the developed world, whether in Europe, Asia, or the Americas. Prosperity is no guarantee of jobs; layoffs continue even amidst a booming economy. This paradox, as Paul Krugman, an MIT economist, puts it, is “the unfortunate price we have to pay for having as dynamic an economy as we do.”6 There is now a palpable bleakness about the new landscape of work. “We work in what amounts to a quiet war zone” is the way one midlevel executive at a multinational firm put it to me. “There’s no way to give your loyalty to a company and expect it to be returned anymore. So each person is becoming their own little shop within the company—you have to be able to be part of a team, but also ready to move on and be self-sufficient.” For many older workers—children of the meritocracy, who were taught that education and technical skills were a permanent ticket to success—this new way of thinking may come as a shock. People are beginning to realize that success takes more than intellectual excellence or technical prowess, and that we need another sort of skill just to survive—and certainly to thrive—in the increasingly turbulent job market of the future. Internal qualities such as resilience, initiative, optimism, and adaptability are taking on a new valuation. A

At the end of the day, we are speaking about a highly personal relationship with the numinous, mediated through a figure who remains, at one and the same time, both intimate and yet infinitely remote. The Dark Man mythos both defies categorization and transcends physical and temporal boundaries. It approximates a relationship with a trickster-like being who appears to occupy a tidal zone of meaning, one that pools, surges, and abates at obtuse angles to our daily lives, but also one which, nevertheless, beckons us to assume a more responsible, less materialistic conservatorship of life and nature.