While bottoms near the shore are covered with detritus from the land, the remains of the floating and swimming creatures of the sea prevail in the deep waters of the open ocean. Beneath the tropical seas, in depths of 1000 to 1500 fathoms, calcareous oozes cover nearly a third of the ocean floor; while the colder waters of the temperate and polar regions release to the underlying bottom the silicious remains of diatoms and Radiolaria. In the red clay that carpets the great deeps at 5000 fathoms or more, such delicate skeletons are extremely rare. Among the few organic remains not dissolved before they reach these cold and silent depths are the ear bones of whales and the teeth of sharks.

Note how the grandeur increases as the sentence gathers rolling force and weight, climaxed by its two four-syllable adverbs. The chapter’s final paragraph ends with another poetic summation—impossible not to quote!—of how much remains unknown about the great ocean around us: Long before coming to the end of The Sea Trilogy, it becomes apparent that Carson has written something more than three individual books, each successful in its own way. They have a design and need to be seen as a sequence: a monumental centerpiece, The Sea Around Us—surely an epic in every sense of the term—flanked by a narrative of departure from the land and going undersea in Under the Sea-Wind, and by a return to the shore, less a narrative than a new personal vision in The Edge of the Sea. The first book begins with a dark coastal picture, all shadows and silvery reflections, and the last book ends with a dazzling array of tide pool pictures, each a microcosm of what surrounds us—distant mountains, the sky above, and water so pure it distills a radiant sunshine. The result is a whole of epic proportions, held together by leitmotifs and themes that steadily recur and echo one another—the bioluminescence of the sea at night, the intersections of death and re-birth, the processes of destruction and renewal, cosmic and geological as well as biological; the endless ambiguities and analogies between land and sea, or time and space, or permanence and change; the paradoxes of seeing and invisibility. Looked at this way, the trilogy has its own ecology, with each part intertwined with and enhanced by all the rest. Under the Sea-Wind reveals Carson’s literary genius. Through clear language, personification, and vivid description, she brings the ocean to us on land. Under the Sea-Wind is the deepest immersion in the sea without going scuba diving. The imagery here forces the reader to imagine the fish and watch the life drain from its vibrant and elegant form. There is sadness and beauty in death, but there is also violence, particularly at the hands of humans:

If Melville’s iambics can be heard in passages such as this, I think it’s because Carson’s sense of awe and wonder—her vision of the ocean’s epic magnificence—came from essentially the same sources. In the Inuktitut language the term for snowy owl is ookpik. In 1963 it was made into a stuffed toy, became wildly popular as a national symbol, and produced several children’s books called “Ookpik the Owl.” The essay was a narrative account of the countless sea creatures that cohabit in and underwater and introduced her two most enduring and renowned themes: the ecological relationships of ocean life that have been in existence for millenia and the material immortality that embraces even the tiniest organism. It was the essay that spawned a classic in nature literature. It is always the unseen that most deeply stirs our imagination, and so it is with waves. The largest and most awe-inspiring waves of the ocean are invisible; they move on their mysterious courses far down in the hidden depths of the sea, rolling ponderously and unceasingly.

Although the bodies of the shrimp were transparent they appeared to the gulls like a cloud of moving red dots . . . Now in the darkness these spots glowed with a strong phosphorescence as the shrimp darted about in the waters of the cove, mingling their fires with the steely green flashes of the ctenophores [comb jellies] . . . Why did Carson feel so strongly the need to proselytize the wonders of wonder? Perhaps she sensed that, without it, an emotional connection with nature would be impossible; without it, the environmental movement had no hope. “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe,” she once said, “the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race.” Today, we remember Carson for her crusading spirit and moral clarity; we cite Silent Spring as an example of a political book that spurred public outrage and prodded the government toward action. However, we far less frequently remember Carson for this other thing she spent her whole life doing: helping the public cultivate a sense of awe about nature. To see this facet of her sensibility most clearly, we need to return to her first three books— The Sea Trilogy.

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We can only sense that in the deep and turbulent recesses of the sea are hidden mysteries far greater than any we have solved. John Updike once said of Nabokov’s style, “He writes prose the only way it should be written—that is, ecstatically.” I think Carson does the same. Listen to her evocation of another tide pool near the one described above. It’s an even more complex aesthetic experience: Evoking the special mystery and beauty of the shore and the open sea—its limitless vistas and twilight depths—Carson’s astonishingly intimate, unforgettable portrait captures the delicate negotiations of an ingeniously calibrated ecology.”

Wheeler, J. C. (2013). Rachel Carson: Extraordinary Environmentalist. Minneapolis, Minn: Abdo Publishing. About Venice [Beach, Florida] there is a special sparkle and glitter over the sands, where crystals of the mineral zircon are dusted over its surface like diamonds; and here and there is a sprinkling of the blue, glasslike grains of cyanite.Carson continues her marine expedition farther and deeper into the ocean, to return in the final paragraphs to this central interconnectedness of life — perhaps, she poetically suggests, our only real taste of immortality: