Word: oceanic
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Rocky coastlines are not that interesting. Nor are beaches: you just wind up staring at the ocean. Forests are nothing but trees. Deserts are beautiful for about 15 min., but they're always out in the middle of nowhere. As for mountains, an occasional range is nice, but mountains tend to cluster and become a continuous piece of bad art, a painting you'd see at an estate sale and not buy. And mountain people are a pain. Vermonters, for example, tend to be very sniffy about who is worthy to set foot in their midst and use their toilet...
...midsummer night on vacation put me in this mood? It's not gloom, but a sense of dislocation and otherworldliness brought on, perhaps, by the full moon. Nights like this I hold my own skull up to my ear, so to speak, and hear the sound of the ocean...
...daughter Cissy. When grief-stricken Miamians took to the streets two weeks ago as news spread that Elian Gonzalez was returning to Cuba, Graham began composing a sympathetic operetta, setting the little boy's saga to music. In a mythic scene, Elian's mother emerges slowly from the ocean, her gown drenched, and softly, in a voice that gradually grows louder, she sings of her loss. "She's like the commentator in Evita," Graham explains, humming a few bars. Can he work in a Tennessee waltz...
...Navy now: Even though it's miles from the ocean, Camp David is run by the Navy. So it's guarded by Marines, very muscular-looking men in fatigues and very, very short haircuts. They run an extremely tight ship: before the small party of reporters and lensmen were admitted into the compound for a brief photo session with the three smiling leaders, the Marines sternly lectured them that under no circumstances were they to bring in alcohol (those press guys!) use cell phones (which, to the glee of the White House, don't work well up here anyway...
...rivers have meant more than quests and more than entrances and borders. They have been tests of what the country wanted of its wilderness and of itself--reminders of the beckoning wilderness of the American mind. Water seems always to be where the great national story unfolds--Melville's ocean, Dreiser's lake, Fitzgerald's bay. But as Twain suggested, nothing was ever as deep as the river. The Atlantic becomes transformed into endless boulevards that run back and forth from the sea, offering both the allure and the illusion of eternity, which means that our rivers, like ancient sacred...