Sea & Fog

by Etel Adnan

These interrelated meditations explore the nature of the individual spirit and the individual spiritedness of the natural world. As skilled a philosopher as she is a poet, in Sea & Fog, Adnan weaves multiple sonic, theoretical, and syntactic pleasures at once.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer, Middle East, Lesbian, Lebanon

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 13, 2012

About the author

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958–1972.

In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959–1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, “an American poet.” In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages.

In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent books are Night (2016) and Surge (2018). In 2014, she was awarded one of France’s highest cultural honors: l’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Numerous museums have presented solo exhibitions of Adnan’s work, including SFMoMA; Zentrum Paul Klee; Institute du Monde Arabe, Paris; Serpentine Galleries; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like it's not easy to describe the feeling when you are alone by the sea, so it's with Etel Adnan's meditations. Lines like waves one after another overwhelm you, you never want to leave the shore or stop reading. It is my most pleasant experience this year.

Water on water reverberates memory’s mechanism.
*
Eyes remain riveted on the moon that’s rising from the edge of a man’s sorrow.
*
Dryness peels away the soul caught in gravity’s unconquerable solitude.
*
The sea is not having nightmares about the Milky Way. Coppery clouds descend through a passage down to the coast. The hills loom in a steely blue color that can slay the heart by its beauty.
*
With unceasing movements the sea, having missed her cohesion, returns. The center is about loss. Far from separation or unity. Loss as the price for Being. Being is mind’s obscure horizon. An incurable presence seduces us with no possibility left for escape.
*
Ghosts stand as sentinels of past loves. Nature doesn’t deal with the past; nowadays, uncertainty skims its waters.
*
Sea: mirrored mirror that distracts the soul from ecstasy. The uncontrollable desire to think the fleeting elements of the world, to fuse them into images, into words, is probably the most hypnotic of all of Eros’ manifestations.
*
Morning. Vast. Imprecision. Fog has covered everything in gray absolute. This has lasted. Doubt looms over the mind. Absence is harder to accept than death.
*
Only waves on waves, that’s what’s coming. I want to go insane, said the sea. She will.
*
We carry our memories in backpacks. The fog’s lightness surprises the senses, until the foghorn blows its complaint. The heart beats evenly.
*
Nevertheless, pink flamingoes walk by the edge of men’s dreams who envy the shimmering light that these birds radiate. Further on, there’s more light and a call for a further flight.
*
I see infinite distance between any point and another. That’s why time has to be eternal. We went to the moon once under a propitious weather and loved each other in ways we couldn’t achieve on our terrestrial habitat. Once in a while, we laughed.
*
Poetry reaches the unsaid, and leaves it unsaid. It’s familiar, it’s indecently close, overpowering at times, as gray as cloudy skies over melancholy mountain ranges; It’s what it is, and for ever the question remains about its nature, and why we’re still looking for an answer.
*
Tumultuous is Being, in agony though not dying. Surrounded by fury. Different in every instance, a stranger to the soul. Where are we in these inter-stellar gardens, at which latitude, in relation to what? Some of us sink into them, others disappear in where stars left traces of burns on the grey envelop of their thoughts.
*
The fog is starting to crawl over the waters. Oh to be on this Earth! Ocean steaming. And what’s brewing in the heart? What’s dissolving, if not one’s mind? The divine resides at the hills’ bottom, not in the valley.
*
There’s a lingering light. Gulls are sitting on the fence, speaking about the great difficulties they experienced on their route.
*
I want the glaciers of the highest mountains to share my miseries. I want a sudden spring.
*
If only thinking could get as impenetrable as darkness, wash off what it pretends to know, die to itself, and land somewhere with no space nor time, as pure presence…
*
On one hand, yourself, only your self. On the other, the ocean, immense, given to itself, and probably to you.
*
Come along
this road
gentle wind
be careful,
the years
have
gone

[...]

How lonely
can one
become,
thinner than
a dream,
as planted
as a
tree

[tasneem · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is so ephemeral and so so beautiful. these observation went from painful intimacy to the omniscience of a grand epic but always, always the beauty of the language came through. its kind of confusing because i kept trying to figure out whether there was a narrative or structural sequence or anything but around the halfway point i realised it doesn't need it and it's kind of the point because neither sea nor fog ascribe to any kind of order. im so glad i picked this up and i cant wait to read more etel adnan

[Jahnie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poetic and lyrical, but I can't connect with it. It felt like a beautiful strong wave that hits you quick, leaving you no time to process. It's just beautiful and that's it. It's gone.

[Madeleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incroyable

Will be returned to

Water

An Ocean in A Cloud

[Jacob Littlejohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

B e a u t i f u l meditations

[Angel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing I could say would do Adnan's book justice, it is a sequence of incoherence out of which emerge spiraling narratives, like what is washed up by the low tide, like the outlines that are visible when the air is steaming with fog--and also what is imagined, what is dreamed and desired and named in the darkness of the sea and in the opacity of the fog, it might drive one insane to read or it may plunge one deeper into love for the absurdity of the world around them, either way, it's worth a read to find out.

[anaeliteratura · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5/5

i'm either too brainless to understand this or this was a nonsensical mesh of words and half-formed thoughts???

[Mohammad · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And eternity may disappear too"

[skumburger · Rating 5 out of 5]

favourite quotes from SEA:

“Some people give their lives for a boat, others would rather swim. And what about the corpses that sharks feast on? Did the belief in resurrection rise from the repetition of the kind of innocence that water induces in the body?”
“Water’s iridescence is language. An exchange of blood endangers our arteries for this salt, this oil. A privilege. Brown stains line the sea as she furiously breaks herself against the coast’s tormented rocks.”
“The sea’s instincts collaborate with ours’ to create thinking. Our thoughts come and go, in birth and evanescence. We feel we own them but we’re the ones to belong to the radiations that they are, lighter than fog, but endearing in their unreliability…
Massive clouds break up to uncover other skies where no divine order betrays its existence. Waves are gentle with the sun’s early rays. Traces of melted copper line the shore. We will not die.”
“Elemental sounds. Always alive, this seamless livid creature. But what is life? A scintillation? On a clear day a different kind of clarity starts to be lacking. We face the river.”
“this erratic edge called restless tide changes its geometry, and with urgent, terrifying power, covers the flat rocky formations that were here and are no more, when waters and foam are so icy that the spine calls for mercy.”
“Like autumn leaves, my thoughts fall on paper. The ocean is near, the sea, far.”
“Geometry’s ecstatic powers overtake the mind. Geometries undefined. Not an apology for perfection, nor an alternative notion of form, but the fusion of sounds with light, there, where anything goes wild within change’s archaic identity.”
“The moon has reached fullness.
With unceasing movements the sea, having missed her cohesion, returns. The center is about loss. Far from separation or unity. Loss as the price for Being. Being is mind’s obscure horizon. An incurable presence seduces us with no possibility left for escape.”
“Measure beyond measure, we shift to discover a longing that pulls us toward the universe’s destiny.
“Love is wedded to time, and revelation is their breaking apart. In one of August’s sizzling days, the sea swallowed a woman whose flesh gave up resistance. Funerals did not take place; instead, the sea howled all night long.”
“Modulations of light faster than speech, than thought, arrest the brain. Where’s the water of disappeared rivers?”
“Our senses are made of its stuff, non-codified, insomniac. We love its turmoil; winds carry dust to it, and to the ocean; more water, element of insanity. ”
“Sea, made of instants chained. Where to shelter impermanence within its defenses? A threat, for sure. What about the permanent affinity between light and mind, both a processing machine, of particles, of thoughts?”
“Nature doesn’t deal with the past; nowadays, uncertainty skims its waters.”
“America’s immensity doomed by language’s fall. Ocean bounded. Illumination and death, non-comparable twins. We’re exasperated by water’s alarming coherence.
“Not ever hesitating, waves surge to reach human speech. They propose a truce.”
“What should we forego to recover kinship with the weather?”
“They had invested in power, not in the pleasure of their agility.
Sea: mirrored mirror that distracts the soul from ecstasy. The uncontrollable desire to think the fleeting elements of the world, to fuse them into images, into words, is probably the most hypnotic of all of Eros’ manifestations.”
”Absence is harder to accept than death.
Darkness was put into orbit and Creation skipped its laws. Ever since, we move in confusion.
A drop of water plus a drop of light have arrived before language, in Being’s pristine isolation.”
“By landing on the moon, Neil Armstrong made a widower of our imagination. Since, we sail with no embarkation. Nature’s fatigue brings pain to the sun’s eye, mud to the Scriptures. The rain dispersed the mountain.”
“I want to go insane, said the sea. She will.
“The sea is momentous duration. A passion for her is love for an illusion.”
“That expanse is insomniac by essence and I, by fate.”
“The divine is not spatial but needs space, is not material but needs matter, is not human but needs consciousness, is not a work of beauty but needs the sea’s power of attraction.”
“The divine is not spatial but needs space, is not material but needs matter, is not human but needs consciousness, is not a work of beauty but needs the sea’s power of attraction.”
“In between, existence’s duration, our efforts of understanding. In the meantime, the pine makes a shadow on the oak tree; the image reaches the brain in spite of myriads of exploding suns. Electronic flowers unfold into sentences of doom.”
“Flowers do cry. They sense danger but their weapons can’t keep predators at bay.”
“The heart’s tightening coincides with the sea’s dilation. Valleys are filled to the rim with snow. What can one do with the possibility of uprooting the forest, seeding the waves with uncertainty? Our load of melancholy has no itinerary. Why should it?”
“Constellations take the contour of our thoughts, and scatter them right and left. There’s this path, narrower than a foot that leads to the ocean.
In Space’s obscurity our eyes, created by the sun, fail us.”
“What does it mean to be water? Can I comprehend you in ignoring intelligence, and contain your immensity? When the cold freezes you, it slows down my blood. Under the moon’s attraction you rise and fall as my mind vacillates and fails.”
“They live with the anguish of being at creation’s beginning.”
“Light springs from the night. We absorb its incandescence. Water by water reflected, desire by desire burned, stretch time’s skin to unforeseeable receiving ends.
“Matter’s mutation into velocity is its guarded secret. So we barely scan surfaces while we think that we’re penetrating mysteries; we consider dust to be pulverized mountains, and luminous rays, Being’s manifestations…the sea swallows fire just to prove her freedom.”
“God guarantees eternal life and is loved for it. But eternity is death’s favorite name. Only consciousness is life, a reality that is the awareness of the passing of things, and that itself passes away. God being eternity can only sink within Himself.”
“But the universe is alive, so how can its parts die? ”
“If life comes out of death and returns to it then God watches candles be lit and then extinguished.”
“life is a dream infinitely less gripping than the one we visit in sleep, less dangerous.”
“Between Earth and outer space there’s a passage whose transgression brings transfiguration. We’re propelled away from our usual condition. Our cities’ avenues confront those of the imagination. The world in shambles.”
“Ocean is first child of Sky and Earth, while Time is the last.”
“The starting point of infinity is always at the center, where mind resides. Behind an image there’s the image. Nothingness is Being’s foundation, put on stage by poetry, which makes the erotic and the intellect meet.”
“Waves pound the coast the way blood infuriates the heart.”
“A cosmology of terror: History’s recurrent theme of tortured bodies dumped as garbage.”
“Everything goes through trial by water in a constant here-ness.”
“Everything is surface on surface, light on light, being on being.”
“Memory will use anything, now that we left the sun far behind.
Ignoring its obscure side, the soul rushes into this clarity; we call it a crossing of transparencies.”
“We carry our memories in backpacks.”
“Primordial chaos yearns to fade away in colloquial invisibility.”
“Salt glimmers on the lover’s body. Lingers. Tears return when heartbreaks don’t heal with time. The sea ushers old games of passion and release.”
“meditation and water are wedded forever”
“The need to forget pain but not its origin.”
“Something as immaterial as space brings relief.”
“the waters will remember that once they were you.”
“we are here, anywhere, so long as space would be. Is given to us sea/ocean, sea permanent revelation; open revelation of itself, to itself.”
“Night has descended. It’s sucking the years to come as it did the former ones. Time is a utopia. It leaves no residue on our hands.”
“it’s useless to hurry given that history has no radical closure”
“all we have is funereal immobility”
“How mercurial is Being! Implying continuity, History is a metaphysical concept: the sea, its outer skin, the body, its seat, war, its energy.”
“Humanity is an ocean, each person a bubble, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing on its turn.”
“This planet seeps into the mind’s corridors. Nights are getting cooler. On the avenues’ aridity days start on time; the body is memory’s privileged subject.”
“We’re mesmerized by immensity touching our body, and instead of a prison, being a liberation.
“Do senses precede the soul? Displacing the question: does life precede birth, precede itself? The spring’s youth intensifies meditation.”
“The vision has already fused with the universe’s history. Now, it’s gone! The same is true of the sea. To linger can lead to suicide, an experience that eludes narration.”
“A sand storm is displacing mountains. In their agony, they dream of a farm.”
“I see infinite distance between any point and another. That’s why time has to be eternal. We went to the moon once under a propitious weather and loved each other in ways we couldn’t achieve on our terrestrial habitat.”
“Poetry reaches the unsaid, and leaves it unsaid.
“We are kept awake by the monsoon’s twisted arrogance. The sun is consumed with grief over the soul’s lunacy that shines darkly on pools covered with soft leaves. Memory’s function is to randomly redistribute the latter on the coming days.”
“There’s space, for sure, we’re of it, but where’s time? Where from? There’s change, and it is movement. No doubt. So time, abstracted from change, is movement represented by a watch’s needles. The measure of change we call time. As we fear death, a fatal change, we fear its progression in everything. Although we love change and marvel at movement.”
“This planet is still friendly so we can embrace some of its lovelier manifestations by letting time bypass our thoughts. But what is that thing that makes us wait for non-events?”
“Each tear, repressed, returns as a wave;
“We look at childhood from the telescope’s other end.”
“To leave in order not to stay.”
“Involved with its own becoming, it renews itself within its echo and matter listens. The horizon is not its limit but the sign of its survival.”
“Hammering one’s head against its inner walls doesn’t crack open the absolute but rather breaks the spirit. O eternity, to love you to no avail! Not being a whale or a tree, I will find contentment in being the sound of water."
“Photography is akin to medieval thinking: it values the instant, is based on the microcosm, the atom which mirrors the whole, the DNA which identifies. To see is to arrest the world, to save it from submersion.”
“when did thinking start? Did it have something to do with the sea’s unfathomable centrality?”
“Destiny is that movement whose sole aim is to continue to move.
Therefore everything rolls and unrolls, runs and misses, weighs and crumbles, is circular and orbital; everything resembles itself in immutable space.”
“Sea: massive energy in sync with mathematics, electric field producer of ideas, in mist, in fog, traveling, erupting in ears, and to eyes, bringing an arrested vision.”
“Where are we in these inter-stellar gardens, at which latitude, in relation to what? Some of us sink into them, others disappear in where stars left traces of burns on the grey envelop of their thoughts.”
“With suddenness, under an immemorial canopy of shifting clouds, two bodies fuse their heat to create love’s birth.”
“Lost battles look at waves for comfort. Ocean of majesty, offered in my honor, you are the sovereign of our territory and all writings testify your power.”
“We have to stitch the Earth together. Our crepuscular fate floats aimlessly. On the beach I pick up words fallen from people’s mouth.
Ocean, widowed by the sea”
“Being is alive. Life brings life. Being repeats itself, a fact of existence. That repetition we call time because it implies time’s existence. What’s then reproduced, repeatedly and with no interruption? The answer is: Being itself, the return of the Same, for an eternity of time.”
“To say that Being recurs implies that it manifests itself in minds other than one’s own.”
“Between what we were a fraction of a second ago, and what’s coming, we hang on a filament: our sanity. The transaction makes what we call the self.”
“Nothing is ours. We are owned by Necessity.”
“The imagination seeks through the sea’s lethargy Being’s mysterious borders, as if Being were an enchanted lake.”

---

favourite quotes from FOG:

“We’re led by the memory of a mountain that was, once, a state of mind.”
“To think without the world, is that possible? Is thinking more material than we know? There are affinities that escape our perception: the unknown is an immense reality.
Nothingness is more reassuring than a cluttered paradise. In Time’s magnitude there’s no room for passion. We need to hang on the idea of the non return.”
“All kinds of diseases inhabit our solitude. Some people witness their soul’s death before dying. That’s an apocalyptic event, a private eclipse.”
“We’re the victims of the theology of power.”
“Myriads of wrinkles make up the sea’s surface. On high mountains we find crevasses that spit those water springs that eventually become the rivers that make History start.”
“Disasters imply a misconception of reality. The heart is a stranger to the patterns of matter or their distribution. In darkness, light’s new measure.”
“Dostoievsky is visiting: hidden by a veil woven by Ibn Arabi.”
“What does it mean to belong to a land? For those of us who live away from our private history, the question never heals.”
“The elusive ‘now’ is just the present’s intensity. When in disarray we realize how relative reality can be; we hear music made with no instruments, we traverse books.”
“Unlit rooms filled with loss; to what do they lead?”
“Being is just a horizon. […] We face the river and know intimately how it feels to be that kind of running water. ”
“Whoever loved a person the way he loved a river has lost both: that’s called a natural disaster.”
“How to know if memory isn’t spatial?”
“Not seeing rivers is also another way of dying.”
“Does this cold body collaborate with the pain it feels, or is it obliged to bear it?”
“The weather is the lover.”
“In sadness there’s more energy than in this affirmative existence.”
“the more the place darkened, the more they glowed.”
“Then, at a certain hour, everything will smooth out. The horizon moves forward in softness then fades. In the process we lose our way to a dream.”
“Nature not keeping archives.”
“To be is to have been and intending to be. It’s not dissimilar to driving a car. Everything we do is in analogy with what we are.
To take pleasure in the void is an operation of erasure, a denial of the ocean’s power, or one’s preparation for the time when ocean will engulf all that there is.”
”We wish not to disappear before having had at least one illumination.”
“It’s not sure we will make it. But the fascination is fatal. It’s fused with the world.”
”Poetry is metaphysical. We’re searching for ways to see, to arrest, to tell, in the great passion for the eternal flow.
And eternity may disappear too.”
“It was easier to resist God’s decisions than today’s super-powers.”
“Nature moves the world and dies without dying and includes us in all its processes.”
“Though thinking is inseparable from life, how wonderful to have it suspended, neutralized, not in a kind of sleep but in the most acute form of awareness.”
“Earth is wandering. Moon’s round eye dreaming. The fields are on fire. We’re entering the heart of strangeness.
Thinking helps the flowering of the body… the sun attracts it, then when there’s a drought on the land, a mortal accident… thinking dies.”
“Like an onion that you peel ring after ring, ending on a void, your “identity” turns around a hole… but if a tree is, I am, – for each, a destiny.
Transparencies within obscurity: in objects, empty space, or ideas. Sometimes we break their inner walls to uncover their mystery, but to remain in the dark.
When everything alive will have disappeared, the great expanses of sheer rock under a pitiless sun will start to show that they too have an inner life”
“We’re sliding inexorably toward a new rapport with Nature: would the trip to Mars alter the way we shoot birds?”
“In the mean-time empires are crumbling. Earth has become too small for the energies that are being unleashed. As revolutions have lost their appeal, mega-storms are in the making, involving weather, matter, and destruction.
Better to stay in the shade, where memory weakens more easily. ”
“In all innocence the fog is touching the tip of the trees. The forest is silent. It doesn’t mind its invasion by such a light substance. Lighter than a dance, than a hand.”
“The sum total of all human sufferings is civilization too.”
“If you’re willing to reach the divine through memory’s workings – go through that fog. Let time run its course. Listen. If nothing happens, it would mean that you reached the invisible.”
“the sea is overwhelmed by its waves. Breathe into it your thoughts, and it will remember you.”
“Would mind dominate Being where gods failed?”
“We are the world reflecting on itself, a medium, exalted, discarded.”
“Time is my country, fog is my land.”

[Shilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so lofty that at times I really didn't understand it, but when I did understand it was like a punch to the gut. 🌊🌬️

[Ygraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

"latest news: and who framed the universe, who and for whom? i created it for the sake of clouds, and all the stars behind. for light's light. for the sea, to be."

[Nicole Lara · Rating 2 out of 5]

What in the stream of consciousness did I just read?
Am I dumb or was the bad?

[ebrar · Rating 5 out of 5]

o kadar güzel ki. hem tadı damağımda kaldı gibi hissediyorum, hem de acaba hiç tam olarak tadını aldım mı diye merak ediyorum. imgeler, şiirsellikle çok güzel yoğrulmuş. okurken hep ege’yi, akdeniz’i düşündüm; sanırım kıyı kesimler diye. etel adnan da aslında akdenizli, bu da bir tebessüm ettirdi.
etel adnan’la bu kadar geç tanıştığıma üzüldüm, sürekli alıntılarını okuyup kitabını okumayı ertelemiştim. distilled from scattered blue sergi yayınında bu kitaptan alıntı da görünce artık okumalıyım dedim.
kendisini tanıdıkça bu coğrafyada onu hiç konuşmamamıza üzüldüm ve kızdım. buradan* ve çok renkli, niye onu tanımıyoruz diye sahiden üzüldüm.

[Jennifer Stoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt like I was reading a lot of Astro Poets' tweets in that the meaning was so elliptical and the language danced around meaning. You have quotes like "every window thinks of itself as being an opening" and there's something profound but deeply...not transparent...?...about that. There's a certain deliberate obscurity in the language that both reveals and obscures, rather like the sea and fog that the volume is named after.

I'm rating it kind of low because it was so dense, but that's more a "this was not my bag" issue than a comment of the actual quality of the poems.

[Dylan Harbison · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Poetry reaches the unsaid, and leaves it unsaid."

According to Adnan, the sea is not meant to be understood, but to penetrate. I think this can also be said of this book. Let it penetrate you, as salt, as sea. Embrace its elusiveness, its obscurity, as fog. Only then you will understand, and live.

Adnan is a master, this book is profound. She meditates on everything from time, space, and human subjectivity to the weather. I read this in tandem with Virginia Woolf's The Waves and I highly recommend as a pairing. After all, waves come in pairs.

[Bill Shultz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful meditation on immanence and obscurity, on attention and dissolution, on warfare and displacement, on Spirit and the tangible earth-stuff of reality, which, of course, returns us to immanence and obscurity. Having just a few days ago hiked with heartache up a ridge into a Bay Area fog, turning to my friend and saying, "dissolving into the fog," this book hit me right on time. Thanks for the recommendation, Aubrey.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel spoiled in the poetry I've read of late. Adnan's work here is taking the best parts of aphorism and prose, stirring them together to blend into a historical work undertaking both our existential obligations and the strings which pluck away at them.

"We're prisoners of the concept of disaster."

Prescient.

[Brett Pyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems are short, vivid, often incomprehensible like zen koan or sparse like haiku, but the language is always inventive and beautiful. They range from very personal to metaphysically speculative, inspired by the local landscape and personal emotion. Challenging, mystifying, puzzling, and altogether wonderful.

[M Pham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fluid, moving reflections that does not care to hold one‘s hand in any explanatory manner. The meditations and structure were eponymous. Grand kernels of wisdom that revealed and smoothed themselves over the waves, fog, sea, and ocean she entangles herself with. A masterclass in how to be assured in ambiguity.

[Peaches · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! Mystical, beautiful, at times hard to follow. I look forward to rereading this book and to follow Adnan deeper down the path she follows. This book has no time, place or narrator. I may not understand this book but I feel grateful that people write books like this.

[abigail · Rating 4 out of 5]

sea makes sense and it resonated… couldn’t make sense of the fog, which was fitting — planning to revisit! i feel like it’s one of those books you could flip to a random page and it could mean something to you, without the rest for context

[Hope Mills · Rating 2 out of 5]

Etel Adnan was a beautiful writer, but these meditations did not resonate with me at all. The poetry at the end, “CONVERSATIONS WITH MY SOUL”, was lovely though. Perhaps I am being unfairly harsh, but life is short.

[Kacey · Rating 2 out of 5]

*2.5*

Rather boring and vague aphorisms depicting the title. I couldn't have cared less about the the first two section, but the final section of the collection truly wowed me. Wonderful word choice, flowed meticulously, and truly emphasized meditation.

[lou garciadolnik]

"Time and fog escape our grasp. But when I drive through a visiting cloud, though limited to a (blissful) moment, I negotiate directly with a cosmic happening, I domesticate an impersonal part of Nature.

Time is my country, fog is my land."

[Hannah VanderHart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply philosophical, fragmentary, stunning.

[isa · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Our load of melancholy has no itinerary. Why should it?" This was süper stream of consciousness, felt like I was floating in language between different dreamlike, surrealist scenarios.

[Matt Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Etel Adnan refuses to simplify the relationship between all of us and nature, and the results are beautiful and breathtaking.

[Klara · Rating 5 out of 5]

like a lightning bolt to the brain; brave, piercing, comfortable with dissolution, possessed by something terribly luminous

[Alina]

Pretty writing, but the work lacked cohesion. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy it.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

~2.25
The second portion of Fog was the best part of this.