Iris Murdoch - The Sea, The Sea (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Iris Murdoch

THE SEA, THE SEA

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. During the war she was an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, and then worked with U.N.R.R.A. in London, Belgium and Austria. She held a studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a year, and in 1948 returned to teach philosophy in Oxford as a Fellow of St Annes College. In 1956 she married John Bayley, teacher and critic. She was awarded the C.B.E in 1976 and made a D.B.E in the 1987 New Years Honours List.

Her other novels are Under the Net (1954), The Flight from the Enchanter (1955), The Sandcastle (1957), The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), An Unofficial Rose (1962), The Unicorn (1963), The Italian Girl (1964), The Red and the Green (1965), The Time of the Angels (1966), The Nice and the Good (1968), Brunos Dream (1969), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), An Accidental Man (1971), The Black Prince (1973), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), winner of the Whitbread Prize, A Word Child (1975), Henry and Cato (1976), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), The Philosophers Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985) and The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She has also written The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished theArtist (1977), based on her 1976 Romanes lectures, A Year of the Birds (1978), a volume of poetry, and Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986). Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, first published in 1953, was reissued in 1987 with a new introduction by the author.

By the same Author

*

THE FLIGHT FROM THE ENCHANTER

THE BELL

AN UNOFFICIAL ROSE

THE ITALIAN GIRL

THE TIME OF THE ANGELS

BRUNOS DREAM

AN ACCIDENTAL MAN

THE SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE MACHINE

HENRY AND CATO

THE PHILOSOPHERS PUPIL

Plays

A SEVERED HEAD (with J. B. Priestley)

THE THREE ARROWS and THE SERVANTS

Philosophy

SARTRE, ROMANTIC RATIONALIST

THE FIRE AND THE SUN

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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1978

First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1978

Published in Penguin Books 1980

7 9 10 8 6

Copyright Iris Murdoch, 1978

All rights reserved

Murdoch, Iris

The sea, the sea.

Reprint of the 1978 ed. published by Viking Press,

New York.

I. Title.

[PZ4.M974Sd 1980] [PR6063.U7] 823.914 80-11380

ISBN 0 14 00.5199 6

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading

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To

Contents

HISTORY 91

POSTSCRIPT: Life Goes On 477

THE SEA, THE SEA

Prehistory

The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold.

I had written the above, destined to be the opening paragraph of my memoirs, when something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it even now after an interval of time and although a possible, though not totally reassuring, explanation has occurred to me. Perhaps I shall feel calmer and more clear-headed after yet another interval.

I spoke of a memoir. Is that what this chronicle will prove to be? Time will show. At this moment, a page old, it feels more like a diary than a memoir. Well, let it be a diary then. How I regret that I did not keep one earlier, what a record that would have been! But now the main events of my life are over and there is to be nothing but recollection in tranquillity. To repent of a life of egoism? Not exactly, yet something of the sort. Of course I never said this to the ladies and gentlemen of the theatre. They would never have stopped laughing.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit: put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good. The end of life is rightly thought of as a period of meditation. Will I be sorry that I did not begin it sooner?

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before. What I wrote before was written in water and deliberately so. This is for permanence, something which cannot help hoping to endure. Yes, already I personify the object, the little book, the libellus, this creature to which I am giving life and which seems at once to have a will of its own. It wants to live, it wants to survive.

I have considered writing a journal, not of happenings for there will be none, but as a record of mingled thoughts and daily observations: my philosophy, my penses against a background of simple descriptions of the weather and other natural phenomena. This now seems to me again to be a good idea. The sea. I could fill a volume simply with my word-pictures of it. I would certainly like to write some sustained account of my surroundings, its flora and fauna. This could be of some interest, if I persevered, even though I am no White of Selborne. From my sea-facing window at this moment I can see three different kinds of gulls, swallows, a cormorant, innumerable butterflies drifting about over the flowers which grow miraculously upon .my yellow rocks...