Adam Nicolson explores the marine life inhabiting seashore rock pools
with a scientist's curiosity and a poet's wonder in this beautifully
illustrated book.
The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes. Look down as
you crouch over the shallows and you will find a periwinkle or a
prawn, a claw-displaying crab or a cluster of anemones ready to meet
you. No need for binoculars or special stalking skills: go to the
rocks and the living will say hello.
Inside each rock pool tucked into one of the infinite crevices of the
tidal coastline lies a rippling, silent, unknowable universe. Below the
stillness of the surface course different currents of endless
motion--the ebb and flow of the tide, the steady forward propulsion of
the passage of time, and the tiny lifetimes of the rock pool's
creatures, all of which coalesce into the grand narrative of evolution.
In Life Between the Tides, Adam Nicolson investigates one of the most
revelatory habitats on earth. Under his microscope, we see a prawn's
head become a medieval helmet and a group of "winkles" transform into a
Dickensian social scene, with mollusks munching on Stilton and glancing
at their pocket watches. Or, rather, is a winkle more like Achilles, an
ancient hero, throwing himself toward death for the sake of glory? For
Nicolson, who writes "with scientific rigor and a poet's sense of
wonder" (The American Scholar), the world of the rock pools is
infinite and as intricate as our own.
As Nicolson journeys between the tides, both in the pools he builds
along the coast of Scotland and through the timeline of scientific
discovery, he is accompanied by great thinkers--no one can escape the
pull of the sea. We meet Virginia Woolf and her Waves; a young T. S.
Eliot peering into his own rock pool in Massachusetts; even Nicolson's
father-in-law, a classical scholar who would hunt for amethysts along
the shoreline, his mind on Heraclitus and the other philosophers of
ancient Greece. And, of course, scientists populate the pages; not only
their discoveries, but also their doubts and errors, their moments of
quiet observation and their thrilling realizations.
Everything is within the rock pools, where you can look beyond your own
reflection and find the miraculous an inch beneath your nose. "The soul
wants to be wet," Heraclitus said in Ephesus twenty-five hundred years
ago. This marvelous book demonstrates why it is so.
Includes Color and Black-and-White Photographs
