The changing interpretations take the form of symbolic representations of the sea in a variety of sources ranging from religious texts, poems, epics, and prose stories to paintings, movies, diaries, logbooks, travelogues, and treatises of history, natural history, and philosophy. As humanity changes through the centuries, so do conceptions of the sea. With the briefness of human lives follows a fundamental mutability of humankind’s relationship to the ocean. What is constantly changing is man.” 1 If claims about the ocean’s constancy can be challenged in the light of climate change, microplastic, and the Anthropocene, Michelet does have a point in singling out the radical difference in temporal scale between the ocean and human history. Michelet, author of the influential and poetic La Mer, points to the ocean’s substantial solidity and claims it is humans and their perception of the ocean that change: “The element which we call fluid, mobile, and capricious, does not really change it is regularity itself. The sea’s fluctuating appearance has been subject to multiple interpretations throughout human history. For centuries, humans considered the substance of the sea to be unchanging and regarded its form as constantly changing. In Western history, from Greek-Roman antiquity to the present, the sea has served as a horizontal screen on which humanity’s cultural imagination has projected its changing social and metaphysical phantasms.
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