Sea

Use in the book

The sea’s value becomes apparent when the reader imagines its absence. Without it, ordinary processes supporting life and beauty would fail; its familiar availability should therefore intensify gratitude rather than diminish esteem. One need not stand in the sea to receive its services, and its usefulness is increased by its place in a world shared with others.

The figurative sea preserves that expansive force. The reader is asked to receive the sea into the veins, and God’s immense goodness makes the visible sea seem a single drop. Such language describes the soul’s intimate appropriation of a common gift and its responsive abundance of affection. It does not grant exclusive ownership of the physical waters.

Places to read

1. I.29The sea flowing in the veins images inward appropriation of the world.
2. I.46Imagining a dry sea exposes the value of a familiar necessity.
3. II.13The sea serves best in its proper place, without exclusive possession.
4. II.14The sea as a drop of goodness calls forth seas of affection.

In this edition

The injunction in I.29 is deliberately figurative. In II.13, “more yours” belongs to shared enjoyment and service, not a claim to territorial dominion over an ocean.

Use in the book

The sea functions as a major differentiated region. It is absent as a discernible thing in the Sphere, friendly with its dispersed parts in B 22, and one of the visible presences named in B 38. These occurrences can be compared with water's place among the roots without treating the entire sea as a modern sample of a chemically simple element.

Calling it earth's sweat suggests emergence or secretion from earth. That suggestion is stronger than a neutral label but weaker than a complete theory of evaporation, mineral dissolution, or salinity. B 56's compaction of salt by the sun is a separate fragment and should not be seamlessly attached as the next sentence of B 55.

In B 1152 the sea receives the exile from aither and spits him onto earth. Here it is a vigorous personal agent within the wandering itinerary. The verbs continue the poem's embodied cosmic imagery, while the element's role is expulsion rather than nourishment or mixture. This plurality of roles is part of the sea's lexical significance.

Places to read

1. B 55The sea is called earth's sweat; its explicit identifying noun is supplied.
2. B 27.1–4Sea cannot be distinguished in the Sphere.
3. B 22.1–5Sea is friendly with its own parts scattered through mortal things.
4. B 38.2–4The visible regional list includes the many-billowed sea.
5. B 115.9–12Sea receives and expels the wanderer.

Translation in this edition

B 55 is a short transmitted expression, not a whole hexameter presented with a developed argument. Its bracketed “sea” is editorially provided. The translation preserves the bodily metaphor rather than replacing it with a guessed physical process.

Use in the book

A662 preserves three distinct accounts. The Philo passage describes congealing at an outer edge and terrestrial moisture compressed by contending winds into low places. Aëtius calls the sea the earth's sweat under solar burning and increasing compression. Aelian attributes to Empedocles the view that sweet water exists within the sea and nourishes fish, adding that a natural explanation could be found in his work. These reports share an interest in material processes but should not be fused into a single continuous cosmogony. Philo's wording survives through substantial linguistic mediation and a disputed sentence about muddy water. Aëtius' compressed metaphor gives an origin without a complete sequence. Aelian's fresh-water discussion concerns the composition and nutritive use of an existing sea; the wax-vessel demonstration he recounts belongs to Aristotle, not Empedocles. The collection is consequently richer when its different explanatory questions remain visible.

Places to read

1. A 66 (testimony)2Philo, On Providence. Supplies a mediated account of moisture, congealing, winds, and compression.
2. A 66 (testimony)2Aëtius. Names the sea the sweat of earth heated and compressed.
3. A 66 (testimony)2Aelian, On the Nature of Animals. Attributes nourishing sweet water in the sea to Empedocles while assigning the experiment to Aristotle.

Translation in this edition

The Philo text is a Latin rendering of an Armenian version; the apparatus proposes changes that can alter whether the product is water or earth. It cannot be treated as preserved Greek verse or a secure recipe for the sea's generation.

Use in the book

The sea is reported as the sweat of an earth burnt through by the sun under increasing compression. The metaphor is not merely decorative: it describes a liquid separated from a larger material body through heating and pressure. Its explanatory force depends on a familiar bodily event, but the report supplies no detailed identity between terrestrial and human sweating. At A782, human sweat is derived from blood melting, thinning, and dispersing; no terrestrial blood is posited in A662. Reading the two passages together reveals a recurring interest in fluid release without authorizing a literal organismic earth. The brief notice also leaves salinity unexplained. One cannot infer that the properties of bodily sweat account for every property of seawater simply from the shared name. Aristotle at A24–A252 explicitly associates the expression with Empedocles, but judges it insufficient for knowledge of nature: a successful poetic metaphor need not provide a clear physical explanation. His criticism makes the adequacy of the analogy itself part of the dossier.

Places to read

1. A 24–A 25 (polemical)2Aristotle, Meteorology. Identifies the sea-as-earth's-sweat phrase as Empedoclean and criticizes its explanatory adequacy as a metaphor.
2. A 66 (testimony)2Aëtius. Calls the sea earth's sweat and gives solar burning and compression as its conditions.
3. A 78 (testimony)2Aëtius. Explains bodily sweat through blood undergoing liquefaction and dispersal.

Translation in this edition

The A662 comment that the phrase has the ring of verse is strengthened by Aristotle's explicit discussion of its poetic character at A24–A252. Neither passage, however, prints a complete metrical verse or marks Aëtius' whole sentence as a direct quotation.

Use in the book

Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIII begins with a question about why the sea is infinitely and eternally pleasing. Its answer joins two qualities: immensity and movement. The passage then measures the apparent reach of the sea in leagues. What matters is not an exhaustive view of an actually infinite space, but a span sufficient for a human observer to receive the idea of infinity. The rhetorical question ‘What does it matter?’ makes adequacy of suggestion more important than literal equivalence between visible object and conceived totality.

The change from a radius of six or seven leagues to twelve or fourteen leagues of moving liquid gives the thought a concrete spatial scale. The notebook does not supply a survey or an optical calculation to be verified as if it were a scientific claim. The numbers dramatize the disproportion between a bounded visual encounter and the immense idea it can awaken. The final description of earth as a transitory dwelling places the observer’s bodily residence inside a larger temporal limit. Beauty is offered to a passing inhabitant, not possessed without limit.

This argument belongs beside the ships of Fusées XI and XXII2. The first ships seem nostalgically to ask about departure for happiness; the later moving ship generates imaginary curves from real elements. In each case perception goes beyond a static inventory of physical parts. Yet the sea is not merely another ship image: its movement and expanse allow a thought about infinity without requiring an anthropomorphic animal or a destination. The distinction keeps the notebook’s separate visual experiments legible.

The passage also places pressure on the claim that nature is abominable. The notebooks can attack natural appetite as a supposed moral justification while finding a supreme beauty in the sea. Calling this a contradiction need not mean that one fragment simply refutes the other; naturel has different argumentative functions. A moral attack on spontaneity and an account of perceptual suggestion are not the same claim. The lexicon therefore neither expels nature from Baudelaire’s aesthetics nor uses one seascape to make his polemical vocabulary uniformly benign.

Places to read

1. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIIIParce que la mer offre à la fois l’idée de l’immensité et du mouvement. — Expanse and movement cooperate in the pleasure of the view.
2. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIIIVoilà un infini diminutif. — The visible field is a sufficient suggestion, not the total infinite.
3. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIIIsur son habitacle transitoire. — The human observer’s dwelling is expressly temporary.
4. Fusées XXIIles éléments réels de l’objet. — The related ship passage distinguishes physical elements from the imaginary forms their movement generates.

Translation in this edition

The English ‘a diminutive infinity’ retains the paradox and its smallness rather than replacing it with an unqualified infinity. ‘Leagues’ preserves the source unit without inserting a falsely exact modern measurement into this phenomenological thought. ‘Transient dwelling’ gives habitacle transitoire a spatial and temporal force; it does not explicitly identify a named afterlife.