All these and countless others are symptomatic of a tidal range, an ebb and flow that extends between sea and land in terms of millions of years of emergence and adaptation. In them the two worlds find their division and also their meeting and intercommunication. Their characteristic areas, their “life zones,” from the tropics to the poles, all require extremes of risk and of the struggle to survive it. In one place or another they dance to the inexorable measure of things, limited in what they do but exceptional in their way of doing it. On this beach, so unique, so well defined, and at the same time so widely involved, every upward surge of the waves and every bubbling retreat sinking through the sand, every range of tide, from the new moon to the old, every storm, every change in the season, every day and every night, is embodied in existence. I would think it presumptuous of me to claim any more on behalf of a bug or myself than we could in our honest natures fulfill, but faced by the shining tides of life, I am sure we have great things to do. My translations are on this beach. I am still a part of its measure, and when I forget those overwhelming controls that human power insists on, and all the artificiality men use to overcome their natural limitations, I begin to partake in this miraculous context. It is a cold beach, a bitter sea. Covered with cold, the sands impersonally receive the shadows moving over them tall and wide, gradually shifting and easing over slopes and shoulders toward the surf with its continual lunge, its pull and push, displacing the pale light that stands over the beach and gives it a hard winter brightness. The waves pour and foam and bubble up the beach and recede with a rainlike glistening and seething that sinks in, leaving dark stains behind. The middle part of the beach shows long thin lines like scars where the last tides came, part of the never ending drawing and erasing on this tablet of the sea’s art. It is all clean, and naked, defined, and at the same time rhythmically boundless, providing everything that comes to it with an inexhaustible dimension. It needs another language, and at the same time no language could really encompass it. In this bold breath and silence moving up, scene shifting, always starting again, there are decisions of sun and waves, of wind and light, that leave me with a true silence, a great room to fill, though it is in my blood and veins, the roots of me to feel, and any companion whom I meet must be in an ancient earth sense completely new, with a freshness made of a million years. X Deer Week