On the Seaboard. August Strindberg

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      And then the eagle of the sea, the king of Baltic fishes, the light-built, cutter-rigged pike, who loves the sun and, as the strongest, needs not shun the light, who stands with his nose at the surface of the water, sleeping with the sun in his eyes, dreaming of the flowery fields and birch pastures yonder, where he can never go, and of the thin blue cupola which arches over his wet world, where he would smother, and yet where the birds are swimming lightly with their feathery pectoral-fins.

      The boat had come between floating pieces of ice which cast moving shadows over the kelp parks on the bottom, like scattered clouds. The commissioner, who had searched several hours without finding what he sought, lifted the telescope out of the water, dried it and laid it aside.

      Then he dropped upon the stern sheets and holding his hand before his eyes as though to rest them from impression, seemed buried in sleep for some minutes after which he gave the pilot a signal to row on.

      The commissioner, who had given his attention the whole forenoon to the depth seemed now for the first time to observe the grand panorama which was unfolding on the sea surface. Ultra-marine blue the water segment extended some distance ahead of the boat, until the drifting ice showed a perfect arctic landscape. Islands, bays, coves, and sounds marked as on a map, and where the ice rode up on the reef, mountains had formed, through one block pressing down another and the following climbing up on the preceding. Over the rocks the ice had likewise piled up, made arches, formed caves and built towers, church-ruins, casemates, bastions. The enchantment in these formations lay in the fact that they seemed to have been shaped by an enormous human hand, for they had not the unconscious nature's chance forms, they reminded of human inventions in past historical periods. There had blocks piled into Cyclopean walls, arranged themselves in terraces as the Assyrian-greek temple, here had the waves through repeated impact dug out a Roman barrel vault, and fretted a round arch, which had sunken to an Arabian moresque, out of which the sunbeams and the spray from the waves had hacked out stalactites and bicelles, and here out of an already heaped wall, the whole wave front had eaten a line of arches of a Roman aqueduct, there stood the foundation to a mediæval castle, marking the remains of tumble down lancet arches, flying buttresses and pinnacles.

      This fluctuation of thoughts between arctic landscapes and historicized architecture brought the contemplator into a peculiar frame of mind, out of which he was drawn by the noisy life which roving flocks of birds were making all around on floating islands of ice and on the clear blue waters.

      In flocks of hundreds and hundreds floated the eider ducks, which were resting here, while waiting for open water to Norrland. The insignificant rust brown females were surrounded by the gorgeous males, who floated high with their snow white backs, sometimes rising for a short flight, exposing their soot black breasts. Loons in small flocks showing their miniver breasts, their reptile necks and drooping checkered wings. Legions of lively, long-tailed ducks in black and white, swimming, diving, skimming. The guillemots and sea parrots in small bands, mournful coal black scoters in marauding parties, contrasting with goosanders and red-breasted mergansers, a more brilliant retinue with panaches on their necks, and over the whole diving and fluttering host of birds that live an amphibious life hovered the mews and gulls, which had already selected the air for their element, only using the water for fishing and bathing.

      Smuggled into this industrial world of labor, on the point half hidden sat a solitary crow, his low brow, his doubtful color, his thievish manner, his criminal type, great shyness for water, and dirty look made him an object of hatred to the strugglers who knew the nest plunderer, the egg sucker.

      From the whole of this winged world, whose throats could set atmospheric air in vibration, above the heads of the mutes down in the water, was heard an accordant sound, from the reptile's first faint trial to utter wrath by hissing, up to the music from the harmonious vocal organs of man. There hissed his mate as a viper when the eider duck would bite her neck and trample her under the water, there quacked the goosander as a frog, and the terns shrieked and mews cawed, the gulls emitted childlike cries, the eider ducks cooed as male cats in rut time, but highest over all and therefore the most charming, sounded the long-tailed ducks' wonderful music, for as yet it was not a song. An untuned triad in major, sounding as the herdsman's horn, no matter how or when it struck in with the three notes of the others making an incomplete accord, a canon for the hunting horn without end or beginning, reminiscences from the childhood of the human race, from the earliest ages of the herdsman and the hunter.

      It was not with the poet's dreamy fancy, with gloomy and therefore disquieting feelings and confused perceptions, that the contemplator enjoyed the big drama. It was with the calm of the investigator, the awakened thinker, that he viewed the relations in this seeming confusion, and it was only through the accumulated vast material of recollections that he could connect all these objects viewed with each other. He searched for the causes of the mighty impression of especially this nature, and when he found answers, he experienced the immense enjoyment that the most highly developed in the chain of creation must feel, when the veils are lifted from the occult, the bliss which has followed every creature on the infinite course toward light, and which perhaps constitutes the driving power forwards to knowledge from dreaming, a bliss which must resemble that of a supposed conscious creator who is cognizant of what he has done.

      This landscape took him back to Primeval Ages, when the earth was covered with water and the tops of the highest mountains were beginning to rise above the surface. These islands around him still retained their primeval character with the earliest formed crust of granite up in daylight.

      Down in the water, where the algæ of the period of cooling appeared, swam the Primary Age fishes and among them their oldest descendant, the herring, whilst on the islands still grew carboniferous ferns and lichens. Farther in on the mainland, but first on the largest islets, the Secondary Age's pines and reptiles would be found, and still farther in, the deciduous trees and mammals of the Tertiary Age, but out here in primeval formation whimsical nature seemed to have leaped over the stratification periods and thrown seals and otters down in primeval times, casting in the ice period on the morning of this day in the quarto period, just as soil on primitive rocks, and he himself was sitting as a representative of the historical times, undisturbed by the evident confusion, enjoying these living pictures of creation and raising the enjoyment through feeling himself the highest in this chain.

      The secret of the fascination of the landscape was that it, and only it offered a historicized creation with exclusions and abbreviations, where one in a few hours could roam through the series of formations of the earth and finally stop at oneself; where one could refresh himself with a resume of perceptions, that led the thoughts back to the origin, resting in the past stages, relaxing the fatiguing tension to win higher degrees on the scale of culture, just as to relapse into a wholesome trance and feel one with nature. It was such moments that he used as a compensation for the past-away religious enjoyments, when thoughts of heaven were only an exchanged shape of incentive forward and the feeling of immortality was disguised uttering of the foreknowledge of the indestructibility of matter.

      How serene to feel oneself at home on this earth, which was delineated to him in childhood as the valley of lamentation, which was only to be wandered through on the way to the unknown; how firm and full of trust to have gained knowledge of what was unknown before, to have been permitted to have seen into, to have looked through God's hitherto secret counsel, as it was called, all those events which were regarded impenetrable, and therefore at that time could not be penetrated. Now man had reached perspicuity about human origin and purpose, but instead of becoming weary and going to rest as one cultured nation after another have done when they have thought until destroyed, the now living generation had taken its part and acquiesced in finding themselves to be the highest animals, and exerted themselves in a judicious way actually realizing the heaven idea here, therefore the present time was the best and greatest of all times, it has carried humanity farther forward than centuries before had been able to do.

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