“Already I looked with other eyes upon the sea. I knew it capable of betraying the generous ardour of youth as implacably as, indifferent to evil and good, it would have betrayed the basest greed or the noblest heroism. My conception of its magnanimous greatness was gone. And I looked upon the true sea—the sea that plays with men till their hearts are broken, and wears stout ships to death. Nothing can touch the brooding bitterness of its heart. Open to all and faithful to none, it exercises its fascination for the undoing of the best. To love it is not well. It knows no bond of plighted troth, no fidelity to misfortune, to long companionship, to long devotion. The promise it holds out perpetually is very great; but the only secret of its possession is strength, strength—the jealous, sleepless strength of a man guarding a coveted treasure within his gates.” (Joseph Conrad ⎪ The Mirror of the Sea)

The sea is the geographic specificity of its habitat and the millennial history that preserves but also a panorama of lines and volumes, of light and wind that decorate it, of noises and proportions of architectures perched on its fringes. With its interstices, its punctuation, it is all the grammatologie of adventure that touches the line of the end radiating towards the horizon, towards what we can discover.

But the sea is also a neutral page, the “place where opposites clash without solution of continuity and pacification”, the page of all the thought of the outside that strikes us with its own diversity; the thought of neighbor who imposes himself in a new freedom; an intense being that precipitates in clarity, in fear, in the incandescent responsibility that still has to be written. Because “the sea testifies to what is disturbing and not stable in the world” – wrote Camus. To talk about the sea is to talk about our immune complexity.