Adam Nicolson's Reading List

"The American critic Steve Mentz has written about Ariel’s song near the beginning of the play and it was his words in At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean that showed me what the heart of this attraction to the sea edge might be. Ariel sings a song about the death of the king in the storm and the transformation of his body in the shallows into a kind of treasure. ‘Of his bones are coral made/Those are pearls that were his eyes,/Nothing of him that doth fade,/But doth suffer a Sea-change/Into something rich, & strange.’ No lines are more famous but everything about the edge of the sea, which is both full of destruction and rich with a wonderful glimmery glamour, is in those lines. It is what TS Eliot called ‘the menace and caress of the sea’—an amazing phrase in which the violence and beauty of the shore are made nearly to rhyme with each other. The book I have written is summed up in the words of those two poets."

"Yes, I have relied on lots of different and excellent guides, including Heather Buttivant’s marvellous Rock Pool and Julie Hatcher and Steve Trewhella’s guides to beachcombing and rockpooling , but of all of them, this Oxford photographic guide became my mainstay, simply because it works! Expert, clear, satisfactorily simple for the non-scientist. (It also has a very good waterproof cover.) And none of this exploration could have made sense unless I knew what I was looking at. I also have to mention the rather more austere but utterly invaluable Student’s Guide to the Seashore by its estimable authors J. D. Fish and S. Fish."

"I started reading this book, which I have to admit is not at all easy and you have to go slowly, because one of its authors was my father-in-law John Raven, who sadly died before I could meet him but who I know loved this bay and often encouraged his children to come looking for marvels here. But as I slowly dug my way into the descriptions of the first Greek philosophers, making their obscure and opaque statements in the eastern Aegean 2,500 years ago, I came to see how Heraclitus could be imagined as the presiding genius of a tidal shore. You can’t step into the same river twice because a river flows. If it didn’t flow, it would not be a river. And for Heraclitus everything shares that condition. Everything flows. Nothing is constant. The identity of anything consists not of its static being but of its passage through the world and time. If the tidal realm is defined by flux, Heraclitus is here on the shore. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter More powerful than that, though, is Heraclitus’s conception of the identity of things consisting of the union of opposites. The road upwards is the same as the road downwards. You cannot conceive of a high tide unless you also conceive of a low tide. They are the same thing seen in different lights. And this relationship of opposites is tensed like the body and string of a bow, or the frame and strings of a lyre. Unless frame and string are pulled against each other, the bow or lyre would not be a bow or lyre. If the frame won that battle and the string broke, or the string won and the frame collapsed, the bow or lyre would no longer exist. Coherence is the tension of opposite forces in balance or as Heraclitus expressed it ‘Strife is justice’. If the strife does not persist, one element prevails and the result is tyranny. This is exactly what modern biology has discovered about the workings of ecological webs. Nature is not in balance but in tension. Competing forces interact to create a rich ecology. A rockpool is tense with that competitiveness, through which a flux of micro-catastrophes and micro-triumphs is constantly churning. Look at a rockpool and you are seeing Heraclitean theory in action."

"Yes! It is the strangest and saddest of books, written by the man who in the middle of the 19th century had done more than anyone else to promote a love of the seaside and its nature. He loved rockpools at least partly because they were a form of stillness in the flux of the shore. They looked like a kind of Eden to him, perfect gardens which change could never threaten. So Gosse became a kind of anti-Heraclitus: for him, in a good world, nothing flowed. All was still and perfect. God had made it like that. But what does such a man do when geology and paleontology begin to show that the history of life on Earth has indeed been a Heraclitean river, endlessly changing, vastly long, a sequence of unimaginable transformations not at all like the one week of creation in Genesis? He responds with the theory in Omphalos — a massive extension of the love of rock-pool-stillness to cover everything that had ever lived. At the moment of creation God did not make individual adult animals. Every plant and animal is dependent on a life cycle that has embedded in it the process of generation, from adult to egg, to embryo, to child to adult. And so God did not make animals; he made life cycles. Every plant and creature was made with its whole past and future implicit in it. This is the idea that lies behind the title of the book: omphalos is the Greek for navel. Even though God had made Adam whole and adult, he would have given him a navel because the cycle of life, his own generation and birth, required it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But it was not only the creatures that were made with their past and future already implicit in them; the Earth itself and all its life was made, in this one week of creation, with its past pre-enclosed in its rocks. God made the fossil record as he made the world. The first trees had rings in their timber, the first molluscs had growth lines in their shells and the first man had a navel, and so the Earth itself had all the cycles of its own immense past embedded in it. ‘It may be objected,’ Gosse wrote, ‘that, to assume the world to have been created with fossil skeletons in its crust – skeletons of animals that never really existed – is to charge the Creator with forming objects whose sole purpose was to deceive us.’ His answer was straightforward and unanswerable: ‘The law of creation supersedes the law of nature.’ God made the world with the past that was natural to it. Gosse’s own beloved wife had died soon before he made this desperate dam against change. He was alone in the world with his son Edmund. And so Omphalos is a kind of plea for stasis, for an escape from the damage and destruction of being alive."

"Tim Robinson, who died earlier this year, is undoubtedly one of the inspirations for this book. His maps of the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara (his ABC as he called them) and the encyclopaedic books that accompany them are object lessons in the modern meaning of topography as an act of very, very close attention, of care as the core of understanding. His 1996 collection of essays, Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara and other writings , contains his thinking about the nature of a shore and, beyond that, the essential unknowability of things, largely because of the fractal nature of reality. He had read, in a famous paper by Benoît Mandelbrot in Nature, how the length of anything expands according to the scale at which you measure it. The smaller the measure, the longer something becomes. Robinson had thought at first he could make a map of the shore of Connemara in all its wriggled, involuted complexity, but the Mandelbrot revelation revealed in a perfectly logical way that his ambition was meaningless. Reality will always outstretch any understanding of it and as Mandelbrot wrote, ‘coastline length turns out to be an elusive notion that slips between the fingers of those who want to grasp it’. This is what William Golding had meant. The world is not there to be lassoed. All we can do in the end is linger alongside it."