Like life itself, the sea is defined by contradictions. For Melville, it’s serene and deadly, dainty and remorseless — a beautiful eternal war.

Melville repeatedly inverts the reader’s expectations. And he does it with contrast. Sure, the ocean’s waves glisten under the peaceful blue sky, but dreaded creatures lurk beneath the surface, waiting to kill you. And sure, those sharks are ruthless, but there’s a brilliance and beauty about them too. These contrasts don’t just happen on the scale of specific sentences, but with the entire paragraph as well, which begins with subtlety and ends with grandeur.

It’s not just the descriptions that capture the sea, but the writing style too. It ebbs and flows like the ocean itself. All three sentences begin with the word consider. Like waves approaching the shoreline with musical regularity, each sentence is the same length, and this repetition gives coherence to Melville’s observations.

Melville’s description of the sea is alive because of the contradictions it captures. The mind likes to sort the world into neat little categories, but much of life is governed by contradiction, and leaning into them is how we illuminate the texture of reality.