I’ve seen it year after year, this Atlantic beach, and maybe for various reasons I’m especially grateful this summer to be here, but I can’t recall a time, in the last four decades, when it’s been so beautiful. The clear mild air sharpens the green horizon. Also extremely precise are the white clouds gathered above the green line. Above the clouds there’s nothing but opal sky and contrails from jets out of Dover.

The deep blue sky clashes with the deep green water (darker and lighter green as the clouds drift), and you think of the palette of nature, so pleasing to us here on the sand.

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The beach is a hospital ward. We lie under blue umbrellas that lean on their sides against the wind. This is the quiet floor. We watch the tidal ribbon wash toward us and we say nothing. The ocean makes us mute. The sun, readying itself for the transit of Venus, stuns us. We feel its heat on our arms, our faces. It makes our eyes heavy.

The sleeping, on and off, of the quiet room. We wake up stunned again into submission. Human voices wake us and we drown.

What can it mean that it’s this beautiful, and that when it tips over into this beautiful all we can do is fall asleep again?

It’s too much for us, the shadows on the field of water as the clouds go overhead. Elemental earth with umbrellas at the edges. How can that be? What are we, if not lovers of the earth – so full of love we can’t bear it? Once in the midst of our passion, we shut our eyes and let the atmosphere – air, sky, water and sand – drug us. Nature’s palliative palette.

Shall we gather at the river? The beautiful, the beautiful river. But that assembly prays, praises, implores; here we assemble to disassemble, to break apart under the sun into clouds that blacken the dreaming mind. Blacken, deepen… Anyway, discolor each blue serene with the mind’s own shades.

Let us all nod off. Let part of the beauty of this scene be the sight of our bedmates’ eyes in rapid dream movement. The sight of their bodies circled by gulls.