I have been finding comfort in the oceans recently.
A livestream of a reef in Honduras plays constantly on my computer, even when lost in a sea of open tabs. I’ve picked up Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist, and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and am enjoying their vastly different interpretations of the singular body. And, sometimes, instead of doomscrolling at night, I now scroll a delightfully playful website called The Deep Sea (tip: keep scrolling). Counting sheep? Try counting fish.
This all began late last November, when I received a notification that Tatiana Schlossberg had published a piece in The New Yorker titled “A Battle With My Blood.” Parked outside the grocery store in my car, I sat, reading and re-reading her essay—an unsparing account of her battle with acute myeloid leukemia, and an extraordinary distillation of love and sadness, personal and political tragedy.
Schlossberg, an environmental journalist, wrote, “My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans—their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer… During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta.” In the very next paragraph, she wrote, “I won’t write about cytarabine.” She died five weeks later.
I was moved by Schlossberg’s unrelenting curiosity amid her illness. And I was struck by her willingness to confront the limitations of such curiosity in the face of her mortality. It is devastating that she never wrote about cytarabine—and more devastating still that she knew she would not.
What I found so remarkable was her choice to face this with no platitudes or promises, no reassurance to herself or her reader that she had learned enough or written enough—miraculous sponge or otherwise. In her honesty, I was reminded of a reality of grief that many of us shy away from: the reality that the possibilities of life, like those offered by Tectitethya crypta, by the depths of the Caribbean Sea, will continue to exist when we, or those we love, do not. The world’s possibilities do not recede in response to our suffering.
That afternoon, while searching for more information on Tectitethya crypta, I stumbled upon The Sponge Guide, a wonderful website maintained by spongiologists around the world. There I learned that the Tectitethya crypta’s consistency is described as “crumbly” and “soft,” its morphology as “massive.” Photographs—taken by one of the site’s contributors—showed an animal that was white and black, and somehow also green.
In the days following my tumble down the sponge void, I found myself feeling more at ease, even in the midst of a turbulent personal life. Schlossberg, and the sponges, had reminded me of something. And in the chaos of our landed world, I had found great comfort in it. But what, exactly, was it?
In pursuit of clarity, I revisited the journals I had kept when researching my undergraduate thesis on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Eliot, one of the great English novelists of the nineteenth century, was herself a kind of environmentalist. Buried in my disjointed collection of notes on Eliot’s life, I hoped there might lie something useful.
You see, Eliot began writing at a time when Victorian society was growing increasingly interested in science, even as the meaning of science itself was shifting. In the years leading up to the publication of Middlemarch in 1871, her letters and journals show that she had steeped herself in works such as Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Biology, and T. H. Huxley’s The Cell Theory. Fascinated by the natural world, Eliot cultivated friendships with these scientists. But, because Victorian women were barred from engaging in scientific research through any formal academic settings, she, like many women of the time, turned to the seaside to study seaweeds and sea creatures (to be a “lady algologist” was, in fact, quite popular among women in the early Victorian period). (1)
Alongside her partner, George Henry Lewes, who himself was an amateur physiologist, Eliot spent summers studying sea anemones along the coasts of England. While Lewes worked on his book Sea-Side Studies, Eliot took notes and wrote letters to friends describing what she observed:
I really give the preference to the wonderful Cydippes that we found yesterday floating on the sunny sea—tiny crystal globes with delicate meridians of cilia, and long streams spreading behind them as they float. I feel every day a greater disinclination for theories and arguments about the origins of things in the presence of all this mystery and beauty and pain and ugliness, that floods one with conflicting emotions. (2)
There—in the Cydippes, in Eliot’s wonder at its “mystery and beauty and pain and ugliness,” and in the tension between her disinclination for theory and her reverence for science—I recognized the feeling Schlossberg’s essay had stirred in me.
The oceans do not promise consolation. They do not pause for our illnesses, our griefs. And yet, in turning toward these vast, unbothered systems—in letting them exist without expecting meaning from them—I have found a kind of shelter.
This, I think, is the comfort: not that grief is to be surrendered to, or that curiosity can save us. It is that the world remains irreducibly strange and alive beyond us. To know this, and to sit with it—Honduras reef livestream humming in the background, tabs open, books half-read—is okay. In a moment marked by instability, I have found a strange steadiness in attending to what will go on regardless. Not as an act of escape or hope, but as a recognition of scale. The ocean exceeds us, and always has. Lately, accepting that has been enough to keep me going (or, should I say, swimming).
[1] Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England 1760–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 183.
[2] George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 341.
Images
Scytosiphon lomentaria, photograph, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2022. https://www.si.edu/object/scytosiphon-lomentaria:nmnhbotany_2378511.
