LIFE BETWEEN THE TIDES

A journey into the wonderment of a tidal inlet.

Memoirist, historian, and nature writer Nicolson brings capacious erudition and acute sensitivity to his intimate investigation of the ebb, the flow, and the teeming variety of life in tidal pools. Like William Blake, who saw the world in a grain of sand, Nicolson sees the universe, and humans’ meaning within it, in that liminal, ever changing habitat. The shore, he writes, quoting poet Seamus Heaney, “is where ‘things overflow the brim of the usual,’ and that brim is at the heart of this book.” Along the coast of Scotland, Nicolson created his own tidal pool by digging through Jurassic rock that had been buried for 200 million years. “If tides are our twice-daily connection to the universe,” he writes, “the rocks are our ever-present library of time.” Soon the pool became home to sandhoppers, prawns, winkles, crabs, anemone, and more—each with its particular biology and behavior, affording the author “repeated chances of ecstatic encounter.” Nicolson augments his own lucid observations with those of naturalists, biologists, and zoologists from ancient times to the present, and he enlarges his purview to include Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Herbert Spencer, and Heidegger, among others, for insight into how “the human, the planetary and the animal all interact” in watery topography. Like Virginia Woolf, Nicolson is “entranced by liquidity, which could embody realities that solids could scarcely address.” The shore, he writes, “is filled with infinite regressions,” from the swelling ocean “into the microscopic.” Water inspires deeply philosophical reflection. Above all, the author seeks to illuminate his own place in space and time. “The coexistence with the things of the pool, the being-with them, a total co-presence with them, came to seem like a way of establishing my own being in the world,” he writes. To be-with is the only way to be.”

Illustrated with photographs and delicate drawings, this book is a marvel.