A transcendent account of “one of those experiences that gives an odd and hard-to-describe feeling, with so many overtones beyond the facts themselves.”
Years before Vladimir Nabokov proclaimed that “there is no science without fancy, and no art without facts,” marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) arrived at the immensely fertile intersection of science and wonder, through which she would later catalyze the modern environmental movement with her groundbreaking 1962 book Silent Spring.
Although Carson had already mastered this then-novel aesthetic of scientific fact conveyed through poetic prose in her pioneering 1937 essay “Undersea,” it was a transcendent personal experience that sealed her conviction in the power of this approach in enchanting the popular imagination — an experience she relayed to her dearest friend and beloved in one of the resplendent letters collected in Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964 (public library).
Writing in early August of 1956, Carson recounts a remarkable encounter with nature marked by an almost numinous quality — a bioluminescent wonderland that reveals the magnificent interconnectedness of nature:
We are now having the spring tides of the new moon, you know, and they have traced their advance well over my beach the past several nights… There had been lots of swell and surf and noise all day, so it was most exciting down there toward midnight — all my rocks crowned with foam, and long white crests running from my beach to [the neighbor’s].
To get the full wildness, we turned off our flashlights — and then the real excitement began.. The surf was full of diamonds and emeralds, and was throwing them on the wet sand by the dozens. Dorothy, dear — it was the night we were there all over, but with…
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