The foreboding and monotonous sea
Some thoughts I had as I contemplated the sea during a cruise.
During the last month of last year, for the first time in my life, I went on a cruise.
The circumstances that roped me into this adventure were completely unexpected and sudden. One day, a few months ago, a family-member called me out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to come with them to go on a short cruise to Vanuatu and New Caledonia. After recovering from my surprise, I said yes.
Now, when people discuss the cruises they have been on, the usual topics of are either the ship they cruised on, or the places they cruised to. I have no intention of discussing either of these things. Rather, I want to discuss the sea.
The vast majority of the cruise was spent travelling on the sea instead of being docked beside exotic islands, and so it naturally attracted most of my attention throughout the trip. While my family seemed bored or indifferent towards the sea most of the time, it inspired far more interest in me.
Both above the sea and upon it, you are immediately aware of how vast it is. While this seems like a very obvious observation to most people, the firsthand experience of the sea’s vastness is very different from the secondhand knowledge of it. I think part of what makes the former much more intense than the latter is the fact that when you are in the middle of the sea, you become very aware of how vulnerable you are within it. Unlike a vast area of plainland or desert, there’s not even the certainty of a stable surface. Nor is there any shelter from the sun besides cloud-cover or the night. It’s this foreboding, this threat-potential, that gives the sea its power.
Another thing you eventually become aware of, is how simultaneously beautiful and boring the sea is. There is a minimalist and “Zen-like” aesthetic to the sea, the dark blue water covered in fast-moving waves contrasted with the light blue sky full of slow-moving clouds. The perception of a true, unveiled horizon is also one of the aesthetic charms of the sea. We are so used to having the horizon obscured or interrupted by buildings, mountains, and trees, that seeing it completely unrestricted is an unusual experience.
Yet this simplicity is also what makes the sea boring. There is truly nothing but a lot of unobscured saltwater sloshing around outside the ship, and so the novelty of it all quickly fades, and you return to eating at the buffet or drinking another cocktail as you play Roulette in the Ship’s casino. The reason for these two very different responses is the same. It is the overwhelming monotony of the sea.
It is monotonous both in the artistic sense of the term to describe art that restricts itself to a single colour or theme, and also in the ordinary sense of something that has little variety or things of interest. It is no exaggeration to say that technically, there’s far more things of human interest in the backyard of some derelict car repair shop in the suburbs, than in 10 square kilometres of the sea. The former has a diversity of unique and individual objects and themes, such as the rusting cars, the multitude of weeds and trees that have overtaken the land, skinks, ants, birds, the history of economic decline and car ownership, etc. But the latter is just saltwater and all the various ways it naturally moves around along with, if you are lucky, the occasional bird or whale or USO to keep things interesting.
But now that living things have been brought up, I must talk of another thing I realised as I contemplated the sea. On the entire trip, only a handful of times were other living creatures seen on the sea. The first time was the most poetic. As I woke up between 4 or 5 AM and looked out of the balcony window, from the left side I caught glimpses of a small, slender bird that was as black as a crow, skimming the waves of the sea, before it moved out of view. The sight of this solitary bird inspired a strong sense of precariousness and foreboding in me, which stayed with me for a long time. Can you imagine being a small bird flying around the sea, by oneself? Nowhere to rest or take shelter, no fellow birds in sight, just skimming the waves for bugs with the possibility that a large wave or predatory fish might drag you in always present.
Latter on, I would see more seabirds. A few times I saw flocks of them flying near the ship to take advantage of the disturbed water, which I assumed was more likely to have bugs or fish on the surface. Seeing all these birds together in broad daylight still inspired a sense of vulnerability, but in a happier context that inspired a sense of wonder. Wasn’t it amazing that these birds could confidently fly so far from land, in the midst of the endless sea? And near the end of my cruise, for a single minute, I also managed to see a small school of flying fish gliding away from the ship. These fish were the only other living beings I saw in the middle of the sea during the cruise. It was strange to see so few creatures in such a large natural environment.
This last observation leads me to the biggest realisation that I had whilst contemplating the sea from the comfort of the cruise-ship, one that combines and distills the others. The sea can symbolise how most of the universe presents itself to human beings. Both the sea and most of the universe share a similar quality of overwhelming monotony. Stars are essentially just “seas” of burning plasma, most planets are nothing but endless rocky or icy landscapes, and most of space is just void interspersed with dust. But as with the sea, this monotonous universe is still beautiful. But only few specks of genuine life and interest exist within this monotony, such as our Earth.
Since this is the first essay I’ve written in 2026, I’ve decided to use it to introduce my Ko-Fi page. After more than a year of writing, I’ve decided that it’s time to give readers the option to give donations to me to show appreciation for what I’ve done. I don’t think I’m ready to start introducing paid subscriptions yet, but one-off donations seem appropriate. My Ko-Fi page is accessible via this link.
As a diver and sailor, I concur with Scotlyn; most of the life at sea is below the air/water interface.The vast majority of life at sea both by sheer numbers and by weight, consists of microscopic organisms. So it is also a matter of scale. Even the most seemingly empty ocean contains uncountable numbers of tiny beings going about their lives, utterly unaware and unconcerned about those incomprehensibly enormous multi-cellular creatures floating past.
What might be floating past us in seemingly empty space at scales that we cannot imagine?
Very nice! :)
Of course all the "interest" in the sea is under the surface of the water - all the life, all the geography, all the drama... Perhaps the monotony is also a "surface" effect? Together with the knowledge that the adaptations necessary for abiding below that surface are not naturally ours?
(I think that I hew to the view propounded by C. S. Lewis, in fiction at least, and which may have been the medieval view, originally, that the universe - including all of "space" - is teeming with life. But also, that much of it - the vastest amount of it, probably - "lives" above, underneath, or beyond surfaces which we lack the adaptations to safely cross, perceive, interact with, or appreciate.)