With thanks to Michelle Woordward whose 2007 blogpost on Allan Sekula’s Lottery of the Sea brought me here, it seems that Adam Smith has a wonderful passage about the sea which does the familiar two discursive manoeuvres -speaking of the sea as a place of work and as the romantic sublime- really well: [33] What a common […]
In his Reflections on Exile, Edward Said has a lovely elegiac essay called Cairo and Alexandria, which is an ode to Cairo and a eulogy for Alexandria. I love the bits that follow (and especially sympathise with the fear of consulates disappearing): Her loneliness convinced me that Alexandria was in fact over: the city celebrated by […]
From Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into the Night (thank you Anya!) EDMUND: You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They’re all connected with the sea. Here’s one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the trades. The old hooker driving fourteen […]
From Melville’s Billy Budd: …war contractors, whose gains, honest or otherwise, are in every land an anticipated portion of the harvest of death…. And he is the inventor of “fog of war” too: Forty years after a battle it is easy for a noncombatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It […]
And it is He who tamed the Sea, that from it you might feed on flesh tender and fresh, and pull fineries to costume yourselves with, and see the ships plying its waters. That you might desire His bounty. Perchance you would give thanks. The Holy Qur’an, The Bee (16:14) Quoted from Engseng Ho, The […]
