Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion

This is the thread for The Sea Around Us. Discussion begins July 15, 2022.

I'm in. I read Silent Spring some years ago, a book about farm crops and the ground we live on. I will be glad to join in to read about the sea.

Great Cynda, looking foward to it.

The topic is open for discussion. I wondered if a 70 year old science and nature book would hold up and find Carson's prose and organization of an all encompassing topic to be well worth the time and she imbues the work with a sense of awe and appreciation. Despite the age, I found much of the information new and relevant and the book does not suffer when we notice how recent knowledge has brought new information. I managed to pick up Covid this week so some of the most recent chapters I read seemed like I was reading them from twenty fathoms deep myself. I have enjoyed this but don't recommend getting covid to enhance verisimilitude.

Here is a passage that shows Carson's literary skills and my main reason for reading this. Note how subtle a difference her not naming the specific Coleridge makes and how the science, the literaryallusion, the beauty of the imagery, all come together to make this passage a bit otherworldy and worthy of Woolf.

AS THE ALBATROSS III groped through fog over Georges Bank all of one week in the midsummer of 1949, those of us aboard had a personal demonstration of the power of a great ocean current. There was never less than a hundred miles of cold Atlantic water between us and the Gulf Stream, but the winds blew persistently from the south and the warm breath of the Stream rolled over the Bank. The combination of warm air and cold water spelled unending fog. Day after day the Albatross moved in a small circular room, whose walls were soft gray curtains and whose floor had a glassy smoothness. Sometimes a petrel flew, with swallow-like flutterings, across this room, entering and leaving it by passing through its walls as if by sorcery. Evenings, the sun, before it set, was a pale silver disc hung in the ship’s rigging, the drifting streamers of fog picking up a diffused radiance and creating a scene that set us to searching our memories for quotations from Coleridge. The sense of a powerful presence felt but not seen, its nearness made manifest but never revealed, was infinitely more dramatic than a direct encounter with the current.

Hope you feel better soon Sam. I saw that lovely Coleridge-inspired passage too.

What caught my attention. I had never before heard of the moon having previously been part of the Earth. I wonder who created those waves of energy and who stitched up the Earth. In Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester, Winchester has included a photograph of a small small section if the Pacific Ocean floor that has organic steam pipes as blow off for the molten center of Earth--and big barely effective sewn stitches on the botrom of the ocean floor. The bottom of the Pacific looks likes burlap. It is a living entity is made very clear by the photograph.

Thanks Cynda., for the recommendation and well wishing.