I
It is good to live ever in the sight of the sea. I have been tramping
two months along seashores, and living a daily life in the presence
of the Infinite. From Novorossisk to Batoum, eight hundred and fifty
versts, I have explored all that coast of the Black Sea that lies at
the feet of the Caucasus--to left of me the snow-peaked mountains
shoulder to shoulder under heaven, to right the resplendent,
magnificent sea.
"The sea cannot be described," wrote Chekhov; "I once read in
a child's copy-book an essay on the sea, four words and a full
stop--'The sea is large'--and whenever I attempt a description, I am
obliged to confess that I can do no better than the child." The fact
is, the sea describes us; that is why we cannot describe it. It is,
itself, language and metaphor for the telling of our own longings and
our own mysteries. In the sound of the waves is only the song of man's
life; in the endless variety of its appearance only the story of our
own mystery.
Thus the sea is all things. They call this the Black Sea, and at
evening when the clouds in the high heaven are reflected in it, it is
indeed black. But it should be called the many-coloured, for indeed it
is all colours. In the full heat of noon, as I write, it is white; it
is covered with half-visible vapour through which a greenness is lost
in pallor. The horizon is the black line of a broken arc. Other days
it is blue as a great ripe plum, and the horizon is faint-pink, like
down. On cloudy afternoons it is grey with unmingled sorrow; in early
morning it is joyous as a young child. I have seen it from a distance
piled up to the sky like a wall of hard sapphire. I have seen it
near at hand faint away from the shore, colourless, lifeless, in the
heart-searching of its ebb tide. It is all things, at all times, and
to all persons.