Nuestras vidas son los ríos que van a dar en la mar, que es el morir–“Coplas” Manrique Are our lives like rivers that run to the sea, which is death? Three quarters of the world, or perhaps even a little more, is covered with water. The sea is vast, deep, anonymous, unknowable. We pride ourselves in our positivist investigations of the oceans, but I get the feeling that the more we know, the more we don’t know. We have both a past and present of raping the seas for their riches–fish, whales, beaches, salt, transportation. Take it from the sea, no one cares; dump it in the sea, no one cares; spill it in the sea, and kill everything in a thirty mile radius. We have fought wars on the seas, but the outcomes have never, ever meant a thing in the grand scheme of the universe. We sink ships, let the victims float away, and the sea remains the same, zealously giving up her dead. The waves roll into the shore, and ships and boats bob in the distance, testing their luck against the unrelenting motion of the sea. The sea is transcendent, universal, an entity out of time; its rhythms ceaselessly hammer its stone boundaries, which eventually erode, break down, wash away, and turn to sand. There are those creatures that have learned to survive in the waves by letting themselves wash to and fro with the tides. Human hubris may challenge the seas, but long after the ships and subs, deep submersibles and bathyscaphes, have gone, the sea will still be there, indifferent, rising and falling. If the sea is death, then it must also be life because those two concepts can only exist together as one. This has been as true since creation, and it will be true when the sun goes out in some distant future. We may paddle around and take specimens, do experiments and write papers, we may describe and predict the tides, study salinity, categorize new species, even learn to swim. Perhaps we can even learn from those humble creatures that live in the tidal pools that live and die with the tides as the sea washes over them. The sea is more than a metaphor, but it also more than just a body of water. So our lives, as Manrique says, are like rivers, big and small, and they all do run to the sea. We pick the biggest, most unknowable sign as the metaphor for death because no one ever returns from that voyage.