Humankind has a profound and complex relationship with the sea, a relationship that is extensively reflected in biology, psychology, religion, literature and poetry. The sea cradles and soothes us, we visit it often for solace and inspiration, it is familiar, being the place where life ultimately began. Yet the sea is also dark and mysterious and often spells catastrophe and death. The sea is a set of contradictions: kind, cruel, indifferent. She is a blind will that will ‘have her way’. In exploring this most capricious of phenomena, David Farrell Krell engages the work of an array of thinkers and writers including, but not limited to, Homer, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Hölderlin, Melville, Woolf, Whitman, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling, Ferenczi, Rank and Freud.

“Philosophers have increasingly abandoned the sea to marine biologists, adventurers, and poets, preferring the security and the logic of the lee shore.”

David Farrell Krell “The Sea: A Philosophical Encounter”. Published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. Donated to the library by Marianna Bouduin from Geneva ❤️

Photos by Anna Iltnere / Sea Library