Where is that eye to the sea beach and the sea that I might enter, to follow further than I know? There are so many unfinished depths suggested by the surface of things. A wet, white and gray pebble of quartz has the kind of grain that leads off to snow and rain and all the watery and windy associations of earth history. A feather, fitted, barbuled, light and strong, holding the air, refracting the rays of the sun and using them for its colors, has the horizon’s curve and the graces of the sky. The bryozoans on the seaweed tell a deep and primitive tale about the salt water and its animation. We should not be so impressed by our powers of assessment as to take things merely at their face value. To see more than the outside shell of the landscape I suppose we should be ready to admit its depths and whatever takes part in them, admitting also, that we are limited in our own capacity. It is not necessarily what I see as I walk the beach that might make sense to the world but what sees me, even though it can’t write a book or drive a car. In the eyes of birds for example is a special kind of closeness to truths of nature which we might only see through a glass. Their very distance from us seems to prove it. Look at a herring gull and you see an animal with less intelligence than a goat, but with the same ungiving topaz eyes. I kept a female brown thrasher once for a week or two and there was nothing her sharp yellow gaze had for me but a constant glare, perhaps nervous or agitated but not to be deciphered otherwise. Consider the eyes of an alligator. They are not even revealing enough to be called “enigmatic,” which might be a misleading word in any case, implying some half-human wisdom like a sphinx. Its eyes are mere sunlight openings, cracks, and crevices. Its lids are turrets, drawn down on a bit of nameless colored water. Other animals, other societies, receive natural messages in ways that may have no more excitement in them than the reflection of a cloud passing across the surface of a pond, and still they may know what we do not, and the place they live in and respond to is our envy to discover. The strict, close relationships in the world of life, the life of earth, result in sensitivities which are no less rare for being divorced from self-knowledge.