Evening promenade ambulations were the always the most calming. The trees lined the right and the sand on the left. The sea reached out for the shore, pursuing and receding. How many people had looked out in just this way over the centuries? Caught up in an idle thought, the germ of a reflective cascade, the bud of a mental exercise through the high-vaulted halls of philosophy.
Perhaps it takes a certain disposition to appreciate this environment. A quieter, reflective temperament with a grandiose capacity for trying to comprehend the mysteries of this world. The sentiment charmed. It repelled any thoughts of loneliness, replacing it with a profound solidarity with all those who must once have stood here, in tranquil contemplation. It was an order, implicit, a gathering of kindred spirits who meet each other not in person, in speech and actions, but in prose or verse. The records of their hearts laid bare for another sensitive soul to imbibe, empathise with, and express in yet another flourish of creativity.
On more transcendent days, it seemed that the spirit of that quiescent community was closer to the sea, the land and the sky than to any other human organisation. How many regimes, triumphs and tragedies had this sea observed? Older, older still. How many births, deaths, frustrations and elations had been absorbed into the memory of the sea? Absorbed and absolved in the sublime depths that deny any attempt at exploration. Like the subconscious of the super-consciousness of humanity, which discovers a rare listener out of every few thousand individuals, who tries to give it a voice for the next explorer.
The exclusivity of the organisation was a source of clandestine pride, but its reality could never be certain. Perhaps such perspective was all too common, disguised in innumerable variations, lenses and distortions into the full spectrum of superficial personalities. Or perhaps it was a phantasm, an ideal borne of a romantic hope of easing isolation, one too acutely felt by asocial individuals, read into the texts and expressions of others.
At other times, the sea lost its symbolism, snapping back to a churning body of water, unconscious, unobservant and unfeeling. It reclaimed its position as a sublime force with mastery over a presumptuous humanity. It broke its mental alliance with a callous fickleness and left the observer stranded and alone. No longer a comfort, but a font of unease.
It would not do. The observer grants his own interpretation and voice to the voiceless, and Oceanus, for all his pretences, could be neither friend nor foe to the community that personified him with recall, and attempted to co-opt into their quest for questions and answers. It was a tool, a platform from which to explore realities beyond the physical, but only as much as a mind was willing to grant it metaphysical meaning by analogies and association.
