My great desire was to walk out over the sea as far as I could, and then lie flat on it, face downwards, and peer into the depths. I was tormented with this ambition, and, like many grown-up people, was so fully occupied by these vain and ridiculous desires that I neglected the actual natural pleasures around me.
This is about 1859. I'm rereading Edmund Gosse's delicate book, Father and Son. Right alongside Cousteau's The Silent World (1950s). They overlap in beautiful ways; Cousteau's ambitions and successes echo with the same desires that Gosse feels - but dismisses - a century before. And for both, such passion for the sea:
For a long time after the date I have now reached, no other form of natural scenery than the sea had any effect upon me at all. The tors of the distant moor might be drawn in deep blue against the pallor of our morning or our evening sky, but I never looked at them. It was the Sea, always the sea, nothing but the sea.
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