Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect - Part 20 (22)

I remember watching this many, many years ago in April. Now, another in a series, by gasps and wheezes, at sea...

From Astonish Yourself! 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-Pol Droit (trans. 2002)

76 Seek out immutable landscapes

Duration: interminable
Props: the Earth
Effect: perennial

It is not exactly nostalgia. A certain tenderness, perhaps, a slightly melancholic form of curiosity. It drives one to seek out landscapes that are the same today as they have been for tens of thousands of years. Are there places that haven't changed at all? That bear no trace of human activity?

What forest has remained the same? What region, landscape, hill can show a wholly unmodified face? What mountain, even? You start looking. You try various approaches. Approximations and hesitations. There's always a nagging doubt: hasn't agriculture changed everything? Erosion? You may imagine that a particular panorama, taken in the round, has remained identical to what a Stone Age man might have seen. But you're never completely certain. Which leads to disappointment.

There is a solution, close at hand. Put out to sea, until you can no longer see the coast. Nothing has changed here. An identical stretched of water is still there. From time immemorial. What you see was seen by pterodactyls. And it still accounts for almost two-thirds of the globe. In other words, the greater part of the Earth has remained unchanged. Alongside the catastrophes, the earthquakes, the changes wrought by man, the greater part of the planet has retained almost exactly the same appearance, wet and blue, as far as the eye can see.

Draw whatever conclusion you like: a matter for amazement, an object of controversy, a reassuring fact, or a bitter disappointment. The foam endures.

Exorcism by Robert Lowell, The Dolphin (1976)

This morning, as if I were home in Boston, snow,
the pure witchery-bitchery of kindergarten winters;
my window whitens like a movie screen,
glaring, specked, excluding rival outlook--
I can throw what I want on this blank screen,
but only the show already chosen shows:
Melodrama with her stiletto heel
dancing bullet wounds in the parquet.
My words are English, but the plot is hexed:
one man, two women, the common novel plot...
what you love you are...
You can't carry your talent with you like a suitcase.
Don't you dare mail us the love your life denies;
do you really know what you have done?