10.21.2026 – the sea answers all

the sea answers all
questions and always same way
and saying: so soon?

The sound of the sea is the most time-effacing sound there is.

The centuries reroll in a cloud and the earth becomes green again when you listen, with eyes shut, to the sea —a young green time when the water and the land were just getting acquainted and had known each other for only a few billion years and the mollusks were just beginning to dip and creep in the shallows; and now man the invertebrate, under his ribbed umbrella, anoints himself with oil and pulls on his Polaroid glasses to stop the glare and stretches out his long brown body at ease upon a towel on the warm sand and listens.

The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way;

for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions

and the bickering

and the prognostications

and the turmoil,

the disagreements

and the fateful decisions

and agreements

and the plans

and the programs

and the threats

and the counter threats,

then you close your eyes and the sea dispatches one more big roller in the unbroken line since the beginning of the world and it combs and breaks and returns foaming and saying: “So soon?”

From the essay, On a Florida Key by EB White as published in The Essays of E.B. White by E.B. White ( Harper Colophon Book: New York, 1979).