Sand as far as the eye can see, between the last hills and the sea
– the sea – in the cold air of an afternoon almost gone, and blessed
by the wind that always blows from the north.

The beach. And the sea.

It could be perfection – imagining for divine eyes – a world that just happens,
the silent existence of water and earth, a finished and exact work, truth – truth –
but once again it is the saving grain of man that jams the mechanism of that paradise,
a trifle that alone is enough to suspend the whole great apparatus of inexorable truth,
a nothing thing, but planted in the sand, an imperceptible tear in the surface
of that holy icon, a tiny exception resting on the perfection of the endless beach.
Seen from afar it would be nothing but a black dot: in the nothingness,
the nothingness of a man and a painter’s easel.

Alessandro Baricco, Ocean Sea