I will be teaching in Deer Isle for the next couple of days and thus electronically incommunicado. Think of me in my tiny frigid cabin by the sea, wrapped in blankets and reading Virginia Woolf's The Years as the waves lap the rocks.

As an inlander, I am still always surprised by the sea, always taken aback by it. The sight of that movement is a shock; the sound is a cradle. 

from To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

 At that season those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask of the sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they affirmed had to consider among the the usual tokens of divine bounty--the sunset on the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moon rising, fishing-boats against the moon, and children making mud pies or pelting each other with handfuls of grass, something out of harmony with this jocundity and this serenity. There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath. This intrusion into a scene calculated to stir the most sublime reflections and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed their pacing. It was difficult blandly to overlook them; to abolish their significance in the landscape; to continue, as one walked by the sea, to marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within.