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Where water and sky seemed to glide into one another, as though the horizon itself were still uncertain what place it should assign to each…
Outside, however, nothing allowed itself to be counted in this way. The sea advanced in long dark masses that rose beneath the wind, hollowed out, closed again, then returned with a persistence devoid of memory. At times a crest whitened, frayed into foam and ran for a few moments across the surface before disappearing into another, while farther away, where the eye could no longer clearly distinguish the line of things, water and sky seemed to glide into one another, as though the horizon itself were still uncertain what place it should assign to each.
And yet this sea, which no calculation could hold still, was already entering, in another way, into that architecture enclosed behind a forehead—not in its entirety, of course, but in successive fragments, in flashes of light, differences of pressure, inclinations, vibrations, rumblings, coolness upon the skin, so many signs that a brain never received as the carefully separated pieces of an inventory and that it had constantly to bring together, sort, compare with what it had already encountered, even complete whenever something was missing, in order to produce from this shifting multitude what we call, with perhaps deceptive simplicity, a sea.
For the brain, too, did not remain before the world waiting for it. It preceded it slightly, continually ventured something about it, prepared the step before the foot came down, corrected the balance before the fall had truly begun, recognized in a new crash enough resemblance to earlier crashes to decide whether it was merely necessary to turn the head or already to brace the whole body towards what was coming; and this power to anticipate what was happening, without which the slightest movement would have required an endless deliberation, carried its own discreet danger, since the speed with which we recognize the world depends in part upon the trust we place in what we believe we already know of it.
The liner entered into this movement without slowing down, and indeed it had been decided that it would scarcely slow at all, for the company, convinced that its superiority placed it in a category apart from ordinary vessels, had made full speed less an act of daring than a rule of navigation; whether there was fog, rain, storm or fair weather, winter or summer, the passage was to be made with the same assurance, as though speed, far from adding to the risk, were henceforth to become one of its remedies.
