Jake Theriault

We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places. …My god… we can’t do a thing! No force in the world can contain this blight… The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn’t the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.

Forgiveness and mercy are truly the only hope, but we humans are so limited in our capacity for these things. So the story had to be about the limits of forgiveness and mercy, both human and divine. …It is impossible to explore the limits of forgiveness and mercy without probing the depths of evil.

Men said that sin became easier over time. Acts of violation or perversion that began as delectations lost their savor and became mere sustenance, and committing them became as rote and joyless as any autonomic function of the body. The conscience was numbed and the mind came to think of the sin as necessary in order to live. A necessary evil was no less necessary because it was evil. Necessity was stronger than evil.

“[making] a human connection, to get out of your own head. To learn something, to change your mind or deepen your convictions. To be surprised or redeemed. Every time you meet someone new, that is a chance from God to be something better than you were before.”

It’s a strange feeling, the feeling you’re living in the apocalypse.

Nature does not, in the long run, favour life. If Nature is all that exists—in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature—then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without the possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it.

“God is a beckoner, I always say. Always calling us, always whispering to us in our dreams and knocking at the door. …[Inviting us to] life, to belonging, to mercy. To wholeness and healing and communion with Him. Maybe this is another invitation.”

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath.

There's a thousand different shades of darkness
Coloring our faith
The past is dead, the future's haunted
What happened to today?

What we want are not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.

People loved to read about sharks, loved to see movies about sharks, love to believe they understood sharks and wanted to protect them. But tell them there was a shark in

People loved to read about sharks, loved to see movies about sharks, love to believe they understood sharks and wanted to protect them. But tell them there was a shark in the water anywhere within ten miles—especially a great white shark—and their love changed instantly to fear and loathing.

I could never write Jaws today. I could never demonize an animal, especially not… an animal that we may—if we don’t change our destructive behaviors—extinguish from the face of the earth.

“It was a calculated risk, Max,” Chase said. “That’s what dealing with wild animals is. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t bite me; I made a judgement that the risk was worth taking, to save the life of that mama shark.”

“But suppose you’d been wrong. Is a shark’s life worth as much as yours?”

“That’s not the point; the point is, I knew what I had to do. The Bible may say man has dominion over animals, but that doesn't mean we’ve got the right to wipe them off the face of the earth.”

“A couple of yahoos are yammering over channel sixteen that they’ve just hooked Jaws.”

“This picture is going be an A-to-Z adventure story, a straight line, so we want you to take out all the romance stuff, all the Mafia stuff, all the stuff that’ll just be distracting.”

Fish stories entered folklore very early. Poets and nature fakers added their touches to marine superstitions that persist to this day. The popular press still cannot resi

Fish stories entered folklore very early. Poets and nature fakers added their touches to marine superstitions that persist to this day. The popular press still cannot resist unsubstantiated stories of sea monsters.

Bermuda’s ocean was one step from being as lifeless as the western eddies of Long Island Sound.

…What had killed Bermuda’s fishing industry… was fishermen. Not only Bermuda fishermen, but the species in general. People. People who weren’t content with making a living and wanted to make a killing, treating the ocean as if it were a deep pit to be strip-mined.

Seventy percent of the earth’s surface was covered by water, and ninety-five percent of that seventy percent had never been explored by anybody. Instead, man kept spending billions of dollars to explore places like Mars and Neptune, to a point where it was an established fact that we already knew more about the back side of the moon than we did about three-quarters of our own home.

It was necessary to wait until the twentieth century, until the invention of scuba equipment and the development of diving techniques, to learn the truth about this unknown, misunderstood, and grossly slandered animal. It was necessary to wait until we could go down to its habitat, and swim in the same water, to discover that it was, in fact, beautiful.

Dawn came, and with it disappointment. Nothing had happened. There has been no yawning of the stern of the boat, no squeal of stretched cable, no sign whatever of action. Red-eyed and weary, we began to reel in the cables…

…and found that they had been sheared off. …Forty-eight woven strands of stainless steel had been snipped as cleanly as if by sharpened bolt cutters. Bitten off.

As for the giant squid, I have continued to look for him every year.

…I have never found him. I will keep searching, but, in a way, I hope I never find him, for he is one of our last dragons, and I believe deeply that we need dragons, to keep alive our sense of mystery and adventure.

To me, the giant squid—beautiful, horrible, efficient, elusive, terrifying, mythical, and real—represents the frontier of the sea, still out there, still beckoning.