The Marginal World

As @jdickerson glimpsed something remarkable on his commute, I happened to glimpse his ponderous tweet amongst the barren timelines this morning and it brought me back over ten years to a college Literature course boldly titled Nature. Specifically, to a passage I read back then on the persistence and resilience of life, my introduction to Rachel Carson:

The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea. On the ebb tide it knows the harsh extremes of the land world, being exposed to heat and cold, to wind, to rain, to drying sun. On the flood tide it is a water world, returning briefly to the relative stability of the open sea.

Only the most hardy and adaptable can survive in a region so mutable, yet the area between the tide lines is crowded with plants and animals. In this difficult world of the shore, life displays its enormous toughness and vitality by occupying almost every conceivable niche. Visibly, it carpets the intertidal rocks; or half hidden, it descends into fissures and crevices, or hides under boulders, or lurks in the wet gloom of sea caves. Invisibly, where the casual observer would say there is no life, it lies deep in the sand, in burrows and tubes and passageways. It tunnels into solid rock and bores into peat and clay. It encrusts weeds or drifting spars or the hard, chitinous shell of a lobster. It exists minutely as the film of bacteria that spreads over a rock surface or a whard piling; as spheres of protozoa, small as pinpricks, sparkling at the surface of the sea; and as Lilliputian beings swimming through dark pools that lie between the grains of sand.

The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life. Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meaning, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings.

- Rachel Carson, The Marginal World

Related: A recent post on skateboarders cribbed source material from another day in the same college course, William Carlos Williams and the “stark dignity” of life’s entrance along on the roadside.

I owe a lot of my reading of the world to Lee Schlesinger, a great professor and a trustworthy guide from the origins of the bible to his favorite poet Rumi to the story of America as told via the works of Melville, Emerson, Dickinson and up through the terrors of modernity (Freud, Bob Dylan) and the noise of what’s beyond.

Schlesinger had a bushy Mark Twain mustache which he probably cultivated because he liked the way it felt to have something so wild sprouting on his face. It suited him well because it matched both his wit and his fascination with post-civil war america. At Yale he had been been a student of Harold Bloom’s and it showed in his infectious fascination with certain topics like Gnosticism. At the state school where he taught, he led us to great sources from every corner of time but also inspired us to find the “occult connection” to the essential, universal and unanswerable questions of our existence.

Here then, a wistful note of thanks to a primary source of nourishment for my own intellectual life (whatever of it there is).