7Q Review: David Farrell Krell “The Sea”

1. What’s it about?

Meditation and sea are wedded forever, wrote Herman Melville in Moby-Dick. In this book, American philosopher David Farrell Krell meditates on the sea from a philosophical point of view. How the sea and our complex relationship with it is reflected in biology, psychology, religion, literature, poetry…

2. What kind of sea is inside?

Sea as life, sea as death, sea as sex, sea as birth.

3. What I loved?

How my mind bent and expanded while reading it. And that someone has distilled what Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzche, Heidegger, Ferenzci, Freud, and other philosophers have said about the sea. Also included are works by writers such as Herman Melville (Moby-Dick and others) and Virginia Woolf (The Waves). The chapter about the amniotic fluid inside the mother’s belly (and the sea) was fun.

4. What surprised me?

I knew the fact that Ancient Greeks did not have a word for blue. But it was a surprise to read that they didn’t have a word for the sea as well. As it turns out, Thalassa is a non-Greek word of unknown origin.

5. What have I put into my pocket?

A LOT of quotes and the dizzying freedom to think about the sea in the craziest ways. Also, the name Alphonso Lingis. Will check what he has to say about the depths of the sea.

6. Cool fact about the author?

David Farrell Krell had written 16 books on philosophy before writing this one – for the first time about the sea.

7. How did it arrive at the Sea Library?

Magically. The Sea Library has a friend Marianna who is working at a bookshop in Geneva. One day she asked, what book would I love to have? Any book. So she sent me this.

Borrow! Read! Swim!

& Check it out on www.sea-library.com

Photo by Anna Iltnere / Sea Library