The train takes a turn between the Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach stops and you can see the ocean. When the doors opened at the Brighton Beach stop I could smell the salt air. I was listening to Ave Maria and the warm salt air through the doors and the swell of the music filled me with such unexpected happiness that I closed my eyes so that no one could see the welling tears.
I think that Proust said it best.
...The sea is not separated from the sky; it always harmonizes with the colors of the sky and it is deeply stirred by its most delicate nuances. The sea radiates under the sun and seems to die with it every evening. And when the sun has vanished, the sea keeps longing for it, keeps preserving a bit of its luminous reminiscence in the face of the uniformly somber earth. It is the moment of the sun’s melancholy reflections, which are so gentle that you feel your heat melting at the very sight of them. Once the night has almost fully thickened, and the sky is gloomy over the blackened earth, the sea still glimmer -who knows by what mystery, by what brilliant relic of the day, a relic buried beneath the waves.
The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament. The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul. Sweeping up with the waves of those movements, plunging back with them, the heart thus forgets its own failures and finds solace in an intimate harmony between its own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges the sea’s destiny with the destinies of all things.
Yup, the ocean is purdy.
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