A scintillating exploration of how ebb and flow influence our cultures and determine our fate, from the musings of Da Vinci to the effect of waves on time itself I write this waiting for the tide to return so I can swim in it. My time is determined by the tides. The sea rules our lives in subtle ways – in what its tides reveal as well as in what they cover. Their movements are not only essential to our lives, but they may also be where we began: 3.5bn years ago, when the moon was much closer to Earth, the tides rose several hundred feet high, leaving huge intertidal zones that stretched for hundreds of miles and created “a gritty, soupy, fecund environment that may have provided the perfect nursery for life’s beginnings”, as Jonathan White writes in his revelatory new book. The sense of the mythic draw of the tide charges human culture. It is why the Māori believed tides rose and fell “at the whim of a woman-god who lived on the moon”; why the Chinese saw the Milky Way as the sea’s waterwheel, continually filling and emptying our oceans; and why the ancient Greeks saw the Big Water as a living being and the tides as its breath. Leonardo da Vinci, too, believed that this “breathing” was produced by the Earth’s lungs and thus tried to calculate their capacity. The associations of ebb and flood continued to determine human fates. In Dickens’s most watery book, _David Copperfield_, Barkis’s life hangs in that balance: “‘People can’t die, along the coast,’ said Mr Peggotty, ‘except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh in – not properly born, till flood ... He’s a going out with the tide.’” Continue reading...
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