The ocean made me feel stupid

No, more like – I tried to read a book about the sea, but the book about the sea was too right-of-centre, and I gave up.  I mean that in the spring I made a project for one of my classes about coastal erosion and time and weaving, but also that last summer (the summer of last year) I read lots of things about the sea and whales.  I had a belated charismatic megafauna phase.  I made my family go to the whale room at the Natural History Museum.

Aside – GO TO THE WHALE ROOM AT THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, it makes you feel like a child.

So then I was hunting for things to read at the library, and I thought I might as well read Sea Change because I see it in every local library, and even though memoir-meditation-history-smattersofscience books by middle-aged white guys are inevitably self-indulgent, they sometimes contain information about the work of C.G.T. Garnier that it would be impossible to find outside of the work of C.G.T. Garnier.

Then very near the beginning, there was a passage about how the sea shaped Us, The British People, and apparently the sea did this partially by being so jolly and super and such a bright wheeze that it ‘kept out undesirables like Napoleon, Hitler and rabies.’  Now, admittedly this wouldn’t be such a problem for me if it didn’t segue into a lengthy passage positing a historical origin for the brace of flood myths (basically, I don’t know – and nor do you, and nor does anyone else), and then suddenly veer into eugenics and oh looky more Hitler.

O Sea, in the future, perhaps you could also keep out Cromwell and Baring and those dicks in Malaya?  The current crop of idiots too?  Oh gosh, Sea, thanks awfully.

(P.S. YAY, SOON, ECT

)

Advertisement