Quote of the Day (Henry James, on a Beach in Summer)

“As you recline upon the beach, you may observe Mademoiselle X… the actress of the Palais Royal Theater, whom you have seen and applauded behind the footlights. She wears a bathing dress in which, as regards the trousers, even what I have called the minimum has been appreciably scanted; but she trips down, surveying her breezy nether limbs. ‘C'est convemable, j'espere, eh?’ says Mademoiselle, and trots up the springboard which projects over the waves with one end uppermost, like a great seesaw. She balances a moment, and then gives a great aerial dive, executing on the way the most graceful of somersaults. This performance Mademoiselle X repeats during the ensuing hour, at intervals of five minutes, and leaves you, as you lie tossing little stones into the water, to ponder the curious and delicate question why a lady may go so far as to put herself into a single scant, clinging garment and take a straight leap, head downward, before 300 spectators, without violation of propriety, leaving the impropriety to begin with her turning over in the air in such a way that for five seconds her head is upward. The logic of the matter is mysterious; white and black are divided by a hair. But the fact remains that virtue is on one side of the hair and vice on the other. There are some days here so still and radiant, however, that it seems as if vice itself, steeped in such an air and such a sea, might be diluted into innocence.” — American expatriate novelist-essayist Henry James (1843-1916), Parisian Sketches: Letters to the “New York Tribune,”1875-1876, edited by Leon Edel (1957)

Quote of the Day (Rachel Carson, on What’s Found ‘In Every Curving Beach’)

“In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is a story of the earth.” ― American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist Rachel Carson (1907-1964), “Our Ever-Changing Shore,” Holiday Magazine, July 1958

The image accompanying this post was taken on a beach while I was on vacation in Hilton Head, S.C., in November 2014.

Photo of the Day: ‘Rapture on the Lonely Shore’—Hilton Head, SC

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
   There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
   There is society where none intrudes,
   By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
   I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
   From these our interviews, in which I steal
   From all I may be, or have been before,
   To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.” — English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812)

Lord Byron never visited America, let alone the shore of South Carolina. When I took this photo while on vacation in Hilton Head six years, the beach at that point in the day was not “lonely.” But I certainly felt the “rapture” he evoked in this passage as I pedaled my bike on the shoreline.

In these dying days of a year darkened by COVID-19, memory is the only way to experience vistas like this once taken for granted in the era of untrammeled travel. But memory—and the magical verses like these—remain, for all that, enormously powerful.

Let’s hope that, at some point in the new year, we will have once again the opportunity “to mingle with the Universe” without fear.

Photo of the Day: ‘An Universal and Unmoving Cloud’—Beaufort SC

“The sky above us showed

An universal and unmoving cloud,

On which, the cliffs permitted us to see

Only the outline of their majesty,

As master-minds, when gazed at by the crowd!

And, shining with a gloom, the water grey

Swang in its moon-taught way.”—English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), “A Sea-Side Walk,” in Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Poems and Letters (Everyman’s Library, 2003)

While vacationing in Hilton Head, SC, in November 2014, I took a day trip to the nearby Lowcountry community of Beaufort. It also impressed me with its lovely seaside views, as you can tell from this photo I took at the time.

Photo of the Day: Windward Beach Park, Brick NJ

While visiting my friend Bernadette last week at her home in Lakewood, NJ, we took the opportunity created by one of the few weekend days of sunshine to drive to nearby Brick. It was fun to walk around Windward Beach Park, with its bocce courts, gazebo, playgrounds, fishing piers, and especially the beach you see here in this picture I took. 

I can only imagine how full it’s going to get—and how thronged with traffic the roads will become—when Memorial Day weekend rolls around.

Photo of the Day: ‘The Voice of the Sea’—Hilton Head, SC

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” —Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

I’m not sure what Kate Chopin had in mind exactly, but this is how “the voice of the sea” felt like to me when I photographed the beach by Hilton Head, S.C., while on vacation two years ago.

Quote of the Day (Rachel Carson, on Where to Find ‘The Story of the Earth’)

“In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.” —Environmental Rachel Carson (1907-1964), “Our Ever-Changing Shore,” in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, edited by Linda Lear (1998)

This picture was taken nearly two years ago, when I was on vacation in Hilton Head, SC. (The bicycle rider in the distance may well be me, as a matter of fact.) Tonight, as I pondered the awful damage that Hurricane Matthew is ready to inflict going up from Florida through the Carolinas, I’m hoping that this special spot I grew to love will somehow be spared the worst of this storm.

Photo of the Day: Tide—of Change?—in South Carolina

The news in the last few weeks has been filled with images of ugliness in South Carolina. It is, undeniably, a haunted land, cursed by a racism that legally (and, for centuries, literally) shackled African-Americans even as it degraded their white masters.

But I hope the state can get through this moment, so that everyone will once again realize—as this image I took last November of the coast off Hilton Head attests—that South Carolina is filled with beauty, too.