From The Edge of the Sea
- Rachel Carson (1955)
"Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us -- a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself."
Rachel Carson is proof that science can be a spiritual enterprise, and scientists can be poets.
My wife was brought up a block from her house in Springdale, Pa (Ms Carson had moved away by the time Mme Reclus was born). The Carson Homestead is maintained as a historical monument to this day. I would often drive by it on my way to visit my inlaws and I would pause and reflect on the paragraph above, which, next to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, I consider to be the most beautiful piece of English prose ever written.