THE HORIZON

I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise or the cod come in to the shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.

—The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald

I live on a small sailboat. Almost every day, I slip toward some undisclosed horizon. Whole lands rise up, some imagined, some not. During these moments, I am often alone, on watch. An experience that has taken time to get used to. My mind likes to wander on that ledge, where the earth seems to meet the sky. Accustomed to being surrounded, I was completely unfamiliar with such silence, hearing nothing but the gentle fall of water from the bow. My thoughts did not want to rest, preoccupied with threshing over the unimportant details of my past and future. I busied myself, carrying out tasks in my mind. I experienced the death of my grandfather, all over again, the phone call from the hospital after days of waiting, the ringing cries of grief I will never forget. It is not how I imagined he would die, had you asked me before. I’ve built many homes on that horizon, future selves, my partner beside me, both characters aglow with the certainty of their happiness. It’s as if, with each fresh turning, I might be able to solidify imaginings that are by nature, out of reach. Happily we fool ourselves into longing or fear. It is a cliché, the world that exists beyond the horizon.

I have also learned that real life can, in fact, come out of it. With increasing frequency, the silent intensity of a moment bursts forward, an orchestral sky, each ephemeral wisp of cloud transfigured into something individual and fixed. A character as known to me as a familiar face in a crowd. Slowly, oceans evolve, revealing countries. Entire mountain ranges give way, walls of rock decipher to become fields, roads—look, a village, over there!—places where life goes on.

Distance from the detail of the world, the space outside ourselves, naturally leads to introspection. There are many reasons why natural phenomena speak to our physical, emotional and conceptual selves, being the stuff which the ecologies of our bodies are also comprised. Such feelings often come to be validated by the sciences. Constructal law sheds light on why the branches of trees mirror those of nerve endings, lightening strikes, subway maps, cultural movements or tributaries in a river basin. Since the early 1980s, the Forest Agency of Japan has recommended forest bathing or Shinrinyoku for improved wellbeing. In this way, our subjective experiences of nature, however trivial they may appear to us at first, should be given weight and value.

The horizon is not a real place. Its line is always defined in relation to the individual that perceives it. These two factors are essential to its power. They are what captivate us. We stand, the world behind us, seemingly in the present, and look forward. Viewing the world at such a scale, we see things differently. It is a phenomena rendered repeatedly throughout Sebald’s, The Rings of Saturn, an entire book following a walk through the county of Suffolk in England. Throughout, the horizon is steadfast and serves to document the changes that occur on his journey, time rises and sets there, characters are pitched in relation to it, fickle histories unraveled by its jarring consistency. Speaking from his hospital bed, it is completely reasonable that the narrator should turn to the horizon. 

Watching out the window of an aeroplane can conjure such emotions, the horizon being at its most pronounced. Karl Ove Knausgaard describes it as a ‘meditative, religiously tinged experience of the now […] waves of connectedness and belonging to the world, and which perhaps say nothing other than ‘I exist”. Perhaps the reason that expansive views of the horizon provoke such strong emotions within us, is because they draw parallels with the nature of our minds, or at least how we would like them to be.

As we go about busy lives, we become shaped by the forces acting upon us, the places we move through, the people we encounter. After spending a couple of hours with a good friend in a noisy restaurant, I become a good friend in return, but perhaps also a louder one. In being together, we confirm each other’s existence whilst validating qualities we hope are reflected in ourselves. I must raise my voice in order to be heard, it is simply just an effect of the environment. Situated in front of the horizon we feel no force. It says nothing of who we are and neither will it listen. We cannot hear footsteps on its surface, or travel across it. It does not recognise our viewing of it. It is not even a mirror, for it does not pass judgement on our appearance. Existing alongside such immense silence, we are able to reconcile our being, shaking loose the identities people attach to us, that we attach to ourselves.

In the summer of 1968, The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race began—the first, around-the- world, solo, non-stop sailing competition. After over six months alone at sea, Bernard Moitessier was leading the race along the final stretch, certain glory along with a £5,000 prize well within his grasp, when he decided to turn his boat around and head for Tahiti. He wrote in his log, “I am in very good health”. His book about these adventures is called The Long Way.

External and internal exploration are inextricably linked. Such adventures—when the chaos of the self is at once simplified by and at harmony with the chaos of nature—are indescribable, the kind that must be experienced in order to be understood. Thankfully, there is always a horizon to be found, even if it is hidden from our immediate view. While open landscapes and mountain ranges are considered best, in reality, access to such vistas really comes down to matters of habit. We must remember to look.

On certain mornings at sea, when there is little wind, the air becomes cool and heavy. It clots to a grey noise and sticks to the surface of the water. Sky and sea blend, the horizon disappears, space is made visible. The trick of the light is exposed.