“In the ocean everything happens in silence“

I was a little kid when I read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. By then the sea had already shown me several times – including the one time I almost lost my mother to a stormy sea – that you need to know how fight for what you want, but you also need to know when it’s time to swim back and live to try another day. Hemingway was a master of description but there is no word immaculate enough to describe the exact moment in which an animal understands that the struggle will have one single, irreversible, outcome.

It is the look of the prey, something most humans have forgotten. In the ocean everything happens in silence and silence makes everything formal.