Luring you to read The Sea, The Sea by compiling lines that made my heart leap out of my body and float in the atmosphere for hours that felt like long decades.
Here is Iris Murdoch's booker prize winning masterpiece, through its bestest lines.
1. "The sea is noisier today and the seagulls are crying. I do not really like silence except in the theatre."
The book contains several descriptions of the state of the sea and it often correlates to the emotions of the main character, Charles Arrowby, who was London's beloved theatre artist until he decided to retire and move to a deserted town by the sea. This is among the first few descriptions of the sea, so plain and upfront before the story gets twisted and complex. It is my favourite because the line signifies the moment Charles's life is bifurcated- his past with the sophisticated silences, and his present/near future with vastly off the cuff drama.
2. "I have been watching the clouds and it occurs to me that I have never done this in my life before, simply sit and watch clouds."
I haven't gone cloud watching since I was seven....what is it that makes us stop looking up to the skies as we grow up?
3."Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage, and why the theatre is always popular and indeed why it exists: why it is like life, and it is like life even though it is also the most vulgar and outrageously factitious of all the arts. Theatre is the nearest to poetry of all the arts."
I like poetry because someone far far away musters up the courage to admit on paper what I secretly, passionately feel. I like it because someone else is being brave and foolish on my behalf. I like theatre because someone else is saying the things I need to say, someone else is picking the ugly fights that I refuse to. I like theatre because someone else is being brave and foolish on my behalf.
4. "The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic; to victimise an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains."
to make them laugh, and cry, and suffer and miss their trains.....to make them barbarically yawp- to their lungs content.
5. "The thrill of a new play, the shock of a flop, the weariness of a long run, the homeless feeling when it ends: perpetual construction followed by perpetual destruction. It is to do with endings, with partings, with packing up and dismantlings and the disbanding of family groups. All this makes theatre people into nomads, or rather into the separate members of some sort of monastic order where certain native feelings (the desire for permanence for instance) have to be suppressed."
I decided to sign up for my first theatre project not because I had a passion for acting or because I needed someone to see and hear me...I signed up because I wanted to learn how to let go of things. Every other project I did after my first was to practice, to perfect the act of suppressing "the desire for permanence" as Charles says. This line says a lot about Charles Arrowby's personality. At the beginning of the book, he gives off the image of a wise, slightly annoying, overly misogynistic, organised person. He pretends like he has perfected the act of breaking free from attachments. But we soon realise that he is nothing if not a paradox, he is anything but wise. He chases a violent pipe dream to hold on to his youth, (in short, he falls in love with delusion). Despite being a nomadic theatre artist for decades, Charles himself hasn't learnt how to stop yearning for stability. It gives me hope for myself but it also makes me wonder if we can ever separate ourselves from our strongest desires.
6. Extracts from Lizzie's letter to Charles:
Okay, so this letter....if I could, I would send this exact letter, word to word, to my situation-ship. It is raw, it is passionate and it is gut wrenching.
Lizzie, Charles' ex- girlfriend/ castmate writes this letter to him, begging him to 'not wake her love' (for him). It is very Kate Winslet in The Holiday, and when I read it I couldn't believe that someone else loved and felt exactly the way I did.
"I still love you. 'still' hardly has meaning here. My love for you exists in a sort of eternal present, it almost is the meaning of time. I don't protest too much. Such love can live with despair, with quietness, with resignation, with ordinariness and tiredness and silence. I love you Charles, and I will love you till I die, and you can put that away in your heart and be utterly certain of it.
we are old friends. But these two particular old friends cannot just say hello, at least this one cannot. I look at your letter and I try to read between the lines. What is between the lines? I feel I am supposed to guess your mood.
you don't say that you love me.
Charles, I want to live, I want to survive, I don't want to be driven mad a second time.
If I came to see you, I would fall straight back into the old madness. All the time we were together I knew every minute, every second that it would end. But somehow (I was that mad) I embraced the suffering, if I could have suffered more I would have suffered more. I wonder if you've ever loved anyone like that?
Anyway, you didn't love me enough and now- I don't believe in miracles.
I love you so much- only I can't put my head into that noose. My love for you is quiet at last. I don't want it to become a roaring furnace. It wouldn't work Charles, I'm not calm and wise, I'd want everything.
Your letter has made an aching emptiness and a need and I shall not be the same.
I do so want us to love each other, but not win a way that would destroy me. I've felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face. Oh the weakness of the power of love! You feel you can compel the beloved, but it's an illusion! I am crying as I write this.
Somehow don't lose that love, the love, whatever it may be, that made you write that letter. And we will look at each other.
Always yours,
Lizzie."
7. "Memory is too weak a name for this terrible evocation. Oh Hartley, Hartley, how timeless, how absolute love is. My love for you is unaware that I am old and you perhaps are dead."
There are so many different kinds of loves stored in this brilliant book. And to match that variation, the book is full of crazy lovers. The worst of them all is the love that is between Hartley and Charles. We can't discount it off as nothing just because it is slightly more delusional and irrational than the rest of them, but at the same time there isn't really anything admirable about it at all. It is feverish and daunting like an unrelenting ghost. It teaches one how not to love.
8. "I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out. Stars behind stars and stars behind stars behind stars until there was nothing between them, nothing beyond them, but dusty dim gold of stars and no space and no light but stars."
the stars don't visit us like this anymore, not even in our epiphanies. It just felt good to hold on to them in fiction, to underline them and box them for myself.
9. "The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of."
I don't think time is linear at all, I feel like we have already lived a few moments of our future and continue to visit memories from the past and then watch the past and the future clash in on our present. Our timeline is like split-ends.
10. "We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge."
"We are such inward creatures...." but is there depth? Will I ever begin to live outside of my mind, is there a possibility? Most of this book happens in the mind of our protagonist, Charles, and he's not a very reliable narrator. All of it is his perception/reflections, yet Lizzie, Hartley, Peregrine, and James- they all feel so real. We technically don't even know them, we are just banking on someone else's assumptions. Maybe the only person we barely know is Charles, assuming that whatever he knows about himself isn't pseudo-knowledge (which it is), so who do we know, really?
11. "And my desire was like a river which has forced it channel to the sea."
"leaving like a father, running like water, trying to change the ending- "
12. "and I kept picturing it and I felt such love and such joy- even though I was saying to myself that I might end up with a broken heart and this time it would kill me- but I thought, I don't care how it ends or how much I suffer, so long as he wants me and takes me in his arms- and now its ended before it even began, and I never imagined it would all be spoilt and broken at the start- and now I've got nothing- except my love for you- all wakened up again and rejected- all wakened up again- forever and ever-"
This is one of Lizzie's lines. She's my favourite character in the book after James because even in her torment, even in her most imperfect moments, she is relatable. Her hamartia is that she's in love with Charles, and that she lets her heart overpower her brain, but I also thing that it is one of her super powers.
13. "It was an awful time, everything was broken, as if one could still stand up but all one's bones were broken, all the bones, and the little joints were broken, one wasn't whole anymore, one wasn't a person anymore."
whoever said love wasn't strong enough...look at all the bones it is breaking.
14. "I would never have imagined that I would dislike the sound of the sea, but sometimes, and especially at night, it was a burden to the spirit."
This is an observation that Charles makes during the third act of the book and in a single line it drastically portrays the change in his character. He once liked only sophisticated, orchestrated silences, but now he was at a point where he would take any silence, to be rid of the sound of a murder- the sea.
15. "How important it seems to continue one's life by explaining oneself to people, by justifying oneself, by memorialising one's loves."
The book is presented to us as Charles trying to write his life's story as an autobiography. He assumes that by writing he can sort of immortalise his life, and leave something behind. But I believe that writing- and language at large- only buries. We don't know who Shakespeare's muse for the sonnets was. We can't memorialise love. We probably wouldn't have discovered anything about vita and virginia if their private diaries and letters were left to fade...
16. "Being in love, that's another slavery, stupid when you come to think of it, mad really. You make another person into God. That can't be right. Real love is free and sane. Obsession, romance, does one grow out of them?"
Before my twenties end, I really want to find an answer to this question. Is real love free and sane? Do we grow out of yearning for romance?
17. "Love. God, how often we uttered that word in the theatre and how little we ever thought about it."
someone told me that just thinking that you got love all figured out, even if you didn't really, is enough...
18. "oh the sea, the sea- it's so wonderful"
The title of the book could have just been "The Sea", but Iris Murdoch says it twice, The sea, the sea...to capture the poetry that lives in the sea as well as her book. It's like you have to say it twice to feel it, to see it erupt out of nothingness...
19. "yes, I've felt half-dead- yes- often. I think quite a lot of people do. But you can live on half dead and even have pleasures in your life."
This line resonates with me so much because I've just hit that sweet spot in life when you begin to realise that some things are never going to happen. You're not going to make all of your dreams come true, you might have to settle when it comes to love, and you'll have to let go...a lot...no one ever tells us that these would become the big 2-0- epiphanies, and they never tell you that you can still go on living with half of your dreams sloshed. This was the first time I saw a fictional character openly reclaim it. And it was fantastic, being in this moment with Hartley, of all people.
20. "Say that you love me, say that it will be all right, that we'll be happy."
Well, I only highlighted this line because it reminds me of the scene in little women (2019) between Saoirse Ronan and Timothee Chalamet, when Jo March turns down Laurie's proposal. It is the most unlikeliest scene to be a "comfort scene", but it somehow it is to me.
It makes me think a lot about how rare it is to find a lover who reciprocates your undying feelings towards them. If you're lucky, you'll find someone who will at least let you love them. But how peculiar....you could feel an entire ocean's amount of love for someone who might just look at you as a blurry, mundane face amidst the crowd. That you could feel so much and them nothing at all....
say that you love me, say that it will be all right, that we'll be happy - it becomes a secret prayer- the words don't weigh anything at all, but it keeps hopes flickering.
21. "you seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all. It isn't just a case of sentimentality about an old game. It's a principle of life, it's a project."
The past, it forges you, but do you usually hang on to the mould long after the sword's creation?
22. "I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, certain agonising thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent. But I was not sane enough to interrupt this mechanical movement or even to desire to do so."
if this isn't how my brain functions during the end-term week...
23. "Why are you always so intent on breaking everything that surrounds and supports you?"
Adding this to the list of things I want to ask my father before one of us dies.
24. "As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling up the whole sky. And far far away in that ocean of fold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing."
Like a play gathering its epilogue...like an epiphany knocking at the door.
26. "That no doubt is how the story ought to end, with the seals and the stars, explanation, resignation, reconciliation, everything picked up into some radiant bland ambiguous higher significance, in calm of mind, all passion spent. However, life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after; so I thought I might continue the tale a little longer."
Like that Tennysonian poem where he sets out to sail beyond sunsets and undo sounding furrows...I'm seeking stories that end without an explanation, to find closure.
27. "Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us."
Loose ends that come undone right before the end of a story console me more than perfect endings can even begin to. We are already pretenders acting out most of our lives, so I'd rather have art that doesn't pretend, before I go.
28. "Or shall I simply sit by the fire and read Shakespeare, coming home to the place where magic does not shrink reality and turn it into tiny things to be the toys of fairies? There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the whole world."
Charles Arrowby reminds me of TS Eliot's Prufrock so much, starting from the dramatic monologues, the vanity, the obsession with the past, and the indecisiveness. We see Charles transforming into Prufrock and then we encounter some stellar moments of truth once he dons this final role. This line cements my imagination of Charles Arrowby as Prufrock because you'd totally encounter a line like this in an Eliot poem.
29. "How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing."
p e r s e v e r i n g, in short.
30. "James said I was in love with my own youth, not with Hartley. Clement stopped me from finding Hartley. The war destroyed any ordinary world in which I might have married my childhood sweetheart. There were no trains going where she was."
How many trains have we already missed and how many are we yet to miss? Do the lack of trains truly eliminate the opportunity of making a way to your destination?
31. "Odd that one can identify a pain as 'missing so and so'".
32. "My love for you is quiet at last. I don't want it to become a roaring furnace. If I could have suffered more, I would have suffered more. Receive us now as if we were your children. Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare. Can we not love each other at last in freedom. without awful possessiveness and violence and fear? Love matters, not 'in love'. Let there be no more partings now. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Love me, Charles, love me enough."
let us not waste love, it is rare. let there be no more partings now. Lizzie's letter coming back from the grave to haunt Charles (and all of us) to mark the perfect ending of a cathartic play is not how I saw this book coming to an end, but I loved every minute of it. If I could only tell you how much her letter means to me.
33. "One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story. She was not able to be my Beatrice nor was I able to be saved by her, but the idea was not senseless or unworthy. My pity for her need not be a device or an impertinence, it can survive after all as a blank ignorant quiet unpossessive souvenir, not now a major part of my life, but a persisting one. The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed."
For this observation alone Charles Arrowby will be the only narcissistic man who deserves a redemption arc in my heart, and for this observation alone, Iris Murdoch will get a top row shrine in my room.
34. "It is strange to think that when I went to the sea I imagined that I was giving up the world"
I love it when loose ends tie themselves up unintentionally. Charles wanted to go to the sea to be dramatic. He drags all the people who make up his world to the creepy village in one way or the other. And in return he meets them for the first time ever despite knowing all of them for years. I think the sea gifted him a new life. It was scary, but second chances don't just hang around anywhere.
35. "Upon the demon ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?"
This is the line that Iris Murdoch ends this absolutely brilliant book with. Need I say more? Are 35 lines not enough for you to pick this book up immediately?
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