I swam across the rocks and compared myself favorably with the sars. To swim fishlike, horizontally, was the logical method in a medium eight hundred times denser than air. To halt and hang attached to nothing, no lines or air pipe to the surface, was a dream. At night I had often had visions of flying by extending my arms as wings. Now I flew without wings. (Since that first aqualung flight, I have never had a dream of flying.)
Interpretation
The quote reflects the exhilaration of exploring and adapting to underwater environments, celebrating the freedom of movement in water.
In this quote, Jacques Yves Cousteau expresses his profound experience of embracing the underwater world. He describes the sensation of moving fluidly and effortlessly like a fish, contrasting it with the limitations of air. Cousteau highlights a sense of liberation and dreams realized, emphasizing how immersion in nature can transform our perspective and aspirations, as if flying through an element totally alien to our traditional understanding of movement and existence.
In practice
In a documentary discussing the beauty of marine life, this quote can illustrate a point about human connection with nature.
We must alert and organise the world's people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises - exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.
No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.
It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.
The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed.
The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.
The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish.
Auld Nature swears the lovely dears Her noblest work she classes, O; Her 'prentice han' she tried on man, And then she made the lasses, O!
Wine is sunlight, held together by water.
Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.
I stood beside a hill_x000D_ _x000D_ Smooth with new-laid snow,_x000D_ _x000D_ A single star looked out_x000D_ _x000D_ From the cold evening glow._x000D_ _x000D_ There was not other creature_x000D_ _x000D_ That saw what I could see,_x000D_ _x000D_ I stood and watched the evening star_x000D_ _x000D_ As long as it watched me.
When we talk about the environment, about creation, my thoughts turn to the first pages of the Bible, the Book of Genesis, which states that God placed man and woman on earth to cultivate and care for it. And the question comes to my mind: What does cultivating and caring for the earth mean? Are we truly cultivating and caring for creation? Or are we exploiting and neglecting it?
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