“At night, upon the tips of treacherous rocks, improbable lights, reportedly seen and attested to by wanderers of the sea, warn or deceive.”
Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea
Night approaches, rising from the sea as much as descending from the sky, gradually absorbing the colour of the waves, erasing distances, drawing closer around the ocean liner that vast expanse which, in broad daylight, the horizon had still seemed to push far away.
Lucian’s Journal
The wind is freshening. Great dark expanses move across the water. A wave higher than the others comes crashing against the bow… Seen from a distance, it bursts into a cloud of white spray. Seen from close quarters, the ship’s speed immediately sweeps it back along the sides of the ocean liner as it rears upwards. The water, lifted for an instant into the air, already seems to be seeking, from every direction, a way to enter into the movement of the ship.
At dusk, the fading light was removing some of the information upon which my gaze had until then built its certainties. The world was becoming uncertain. Forms were fading away. My brain was struggling to continue forming stable images. It reconstructed volumes from a glimmer, a slight difference between shades of black, a movement briefly glimpsed. Curiously, at certain moments, I could continue to see long after vision would normally have become almost impossible. This is one of the strengths of our brain, this ability to fashion continuity out of fragments, to avoid abandoning the world whenever it becomes incomplete. Night thus reveals, more clearly than day, how much seeing also consists in completing what is seen.
I tell myself that, aboard this ocean liner, danger, should it come, would not arise solely when nothing could be seen any longer. The distance between what actually appears ahead of the bow and what the mind has time to make of it may become, before anyone is even aware of it, a critical distance.
Little by little, it was becoming difficult to tell which of the two was imposing its movement upon the other. The ocean liner was still cutting through the sea, but the sea was lifting it, making it roll, tilting its decks slightly before restoring them to the horizontal. The wind swept through the superstructures, darkness spread across the porthole windows, waves struck the steel, and even the ship’s speed, that symbol of mastery, seemed to be overtaken by something more immense. As though the voyage itself were imperceptibly ceasing to belong entirely to the one who believed himself to be directing it.
The body often knows better than thought. Whenever the deck tilts, it compensates… Whenever a wave lifted the immense mass of the ship, something in the legs, the pelvis, the shoulders accompanied that movement without waiting for it to be named, so that it became impossible to determine exactly where the displacement imposed by the sea ended and where the movement by which the body sought to respond to it began. Balance was no longer the maintenance of a position, but an uninterrupted succession of losses, each slight enough to be immediately recovered. This discovery remained buried within the muscles, like knowledge transmitted through a language still unknown.
Thus the ocean was already crossing the hull without allowing a single drop of water inside. It entered in the form of movement. It passed from wave to steel, from steel to deck, from deck to legs, from legs into those innumerable networks where a tilt became sensation, correction, memory, and perhaps the most carefully maintained separation of all… that which made the sea an outside and the one who watched it an inside… was already beginning to lose its clarity long before anything had actually broken.
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