Henry Wadsworth Longfellow tagged posts

The Tides As Science and Metaphor

I’ve been steeped in tides on two different occasions over the past several months, luxuriating for several days each time on different coasts, watching the tides do what they seem to have been doing for quite some time now.

I’ll bet you know the drill:

The tides come in…

The tides go out…

Kind of repetitive and boring, eh?

Truth to tell, for all the time I’ve spent seaside, growing up in southern California and then living on the beach for a couple of years in my adult life, I haven’t investigated the science of tides all that much. I have always vaguely understood them to be controlled by the moon with some kind of mysterious gravitational push and pull, but beyond that, I have enjoyed tides mostly as a balm for my soul, a kind of hypnotic transitional happenstance resembling the passage from day to night and back again, summer to fall and so on.

The rhythms of nature.

But of course, science ...

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