There are also books about the sea where the sea is not mentioned.

The sea makes a hole and fills it, warns a Mallorcan saying. Like love, we might add, another immense thing in which it is possible to drown. Or to be enlightened, like the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, with that poem entitled Tomorrow and which only has these two lines: "I am illuminated / by the immensity." The sea makes us think of bright mornings; love too.

Now, the one who associated the sea with love like no one else was our Ausiàs March. "The sea will boil like a pot in an oven" will, in all likelihood, be one of the most hallucinatory verses ever written about the sea to this day. Also one of the most egocentric, because in the poem to which it belongs, Ausiàs March subordinates the immensity of the sea to that of his love, to the desire he feels to be with his beloved again: "Sails and winds have my wishes fulfilled," reads the first and well-known verse of the poem, and then goes on to list them. Thus, Ausiàs demonstrates that when, a few stanzas later, he describes himself as "I am that extreme loving pus," he isn't being vain or just saying it for the sake of it. This 15th-century Valencian poet, one of the most important in Europe at the time, who had little or nothing to envy of Dante, Petrarch, or Garcilaso, would not feel, today, inferior to any hip-hop or reggaeton singer when it came to becoming a millionaire.

Nor would he have been impressed by the apocalyptic fantasies of Hollywood cinema. The entire second stanza goes like this: "The sea will boil like a pot in an oven / changing color and its natural state [...] Large and few fish will run around / and seek secret hiding places: / fleeing to the sea, where they are nourished and made, / by a great remedy on land." The poet is so brave that he will cross (from Italy to Gandía or Valencia) that terrifying sea from which even fish flee, only to be reunited with his beloved, a lily among thistles, or full of sanity. Although it is also possible that his inspiration was aided by the anonymous authors who over time have been taking and subtracting verses from the lyrics of the Song of the Sibyl: "Seas, fountains and rivers, / everything will burn. / The fish will give out / horrible screams / losing their / natural delights."

The sea as a representation of the Last Judgment, the end of days. In the midst of a new era of war, with the West rearming while the US and Israel, with their ignominious leaders Trump and Netanyahu and all those who follow them, play at being gods of war, the image of a sea burning from end to end, from one end to the other of that human revolution shaped by the planet. The hydrogen bomb, more destructive than a nuclear bomb, could cause the atmosphere to ignite, literally the fiery explosion of the air we breathe. That the scene of the tragedy is the Middle East, with war in Iran and genocide in Palestine, rhymes macabrely with the fact that, years ago, the waters of the Mediterranean became the tomb of so many people drowned in small boats machine-gunned by Turkish or Lebanese patrol boats.

Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick It doesn't take place in the Mediterranean, but rather turns the Pacific Ocean into a metaphor for madness and obsession, and that's why it's a story we find modern today. Madness, both individual and collective, is, indeed, unfathomable, oceanic. At the same time, the oceans, and also a sea like the Mediterranean, remind us of everything we are unable to understand. The sea is the mystery, even though it's very close to us. Like the forest, it's associated with the unknown, and therefore with a threat. But it's also (it's the bright side) with adventure, discovery, the pure and simple joy of living.

The sound of the Micalet bells on Corpus Christi morning through the almost empty streets of Valencia's Carmen neighborhood, with the summer light breaking over the rooftops, is all we need to know about the sea, even though we can't see it. Blai Bonet wrote one of the most important novels ever written in Catalan and titled it The sea; is a suffocating story set in a tuberculosis sanatorium, where a group of young people struggle against forces beyond them: the disease that turns their lungs into caverns, the malnutrition of the poor, and sexual desire. Agustí Virallonga managed to film a movie that is also titled The sea and which is as demanding and abrasive as the book on which it was based. In a Barcelona cinema where it was shown—and which no longer exists—on the metal door of the theater, just before entering the screening, the viewer was confronted with a sign made with a home printer. It was a warning about two facts that the theater's management found alarming enough to have to inform anyone who dared to enter to see the film, like someone who puts a bandage on a wound. "The management of this theater would like to warn you that, one, this film is spoken in Mallorcan. And two, in that film you cannot see the sea."

The sea is so vast and so deep that sometimes, in order to talk about it, it's necessary to ignore the sight of it. The same thing happens with love. As in the film In the mood for love, by Wong Kar-wai, ora The White Nights, by Dostoevsky (and its film adaptation by Luchino Visconti), in which lovers call each other their love by saying almost nothing. A minute of complete happiness compensates for a lifetime of heartbreak, as the protagonist of The White Nights at the end of the story, when his beloved has already married another man (the translation into Catalan is by Miquel Cabal Guarro): "Do I have to fill your heart with sadness with bitter reproaches? Do I have to crush a single one of those delicate flowers that you threw at yourself, never! May the sky be clear, may your sweet smile be bright and serene, may you be blessed for the minute of bliss and happiness that you gave to another heart, solitary and grateful!"

This moment of happiness can give her another form of love, as happens in this description of Genoa by Paul Valéry, so restrained, and for that very reason, so exalted in relation to the city, so enamored. He says (the translation is by Antoni Clapés): "This city, clearly visible and present in itself; perpetually familiar with its sea, the rock, the slate, the tile, the marble, always working against the mountain." And further on: "Oh concentrated smells, icy smells, potions, cheeses, roasted coffees, delicious, finely roasted cocoas that exude bitterness..." And finally: "Odorous kitchens. These gigantic savory cakes, chickpea biscuits, grasses in oil, sardines in oil, spinach, fried foods. This cuisine so ancient. We haven't seen the sea either, but we've sensed it, we've smelled it in every line."

"That roof that invites the white doves / Quietly throbs between tombs and pines; / Midday composes just enough with brief fires / The sea, the sea that always begins again! / After a thought, oh reward, / A long look on the repose of the gods! Valéry also wrote The marine cemetery, undoubtedly one of the most outstanding poems in 20th-century European literature: here we quote the best-known verses, in their Catalan version by Xavier Benguerel. The marine cemetery It is an intense, pugnacious, profound meditation on death and life, suggested by a visit to the Occitan town of Seta, in Languedoc. The cemetery of this town is located at a high point, from where one has a beautiful view of the sea, and it is the sea, again, that suggests to Valéry the idea of mystery and death. Also that of eternal return:The grouper, the grouper, toujours recommence!", he exclaims, in a verse that has the quality of being absolutely poetic and, at the same time, literally true. Due to the physical composition of the place, Valéry could have had a similar impact to Seta if he had visited the cemetery of Deià, where Robert Graves is buried because he spent the second half of his life in this town (they have proposed to destroy it), and also for reasons similar to those that led Valéry to write his poem. corniche of Rabat, which ends with a cemetery hanging over the horizon line, between the blue of the sky and the sea. corniche, the seafront promenades of North African cities, balconies overlooking the sea, like the corniche of Alexandria, where Justine, Clea, Balthazar and Mountolives, the protagonists of the Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, another novel (made up of four short novels) written looking at the sea.

Contrary to what we might imagine, the sea is not limited to the Mediterranean. At the end of the novel The seaIn John Banville's The Last Supper, the protagonist, Max Morden, while awaiting the death of a loved one, recalls a moment he experienced one summer long ago in the waters of the Irish Sea. He was soaking wet, submerged only to his waist, and suddenly there was a shift in the tide, and the water pushed him back onto the sidewalk, gently but beyond his power to prevent it. The sea hadn't meant to harm him, but it could have, for he was at its mercy, even when he thought he was in no danger. After summoning this memory, Max follows a nurse into the hospital and compares entering this place to entering the sea. Banville, then, returns to the recurring connection between the sea and death, and to his very precise style.The sea It is a novel, but many of its passages can be read as if they were prose poems—, which has been compared to Proust and Nabokov, personally makes me think of his compatriot Joyce: specifically, Banville seems to be looking for a metaphor with the sea equivalent to the one Joyce built with the snow at the end ofThe dead, a story (and a film adaptation by John Huston that served as his artistic testament) that should always be recommended even if it seems irrelevant.

Banville certainly succeeds in his task. However, he published The sea (The Sea) in 2005; twenty-seven years earlier, in 1978, another Irish writer, Iris Murdoch, had published another novel, The sea, the sea (The Sea, the Sea) also poetic, also philosophical, also extraordinary, and which in some respects seems to be the negative of Banville's. The protagonist, Charles Arrowby, declares at the beginning of the story (I quote from Laura Baena's Catalan translation): "However, I must strive not to try write elegantly, as this would ruin my initiative. Besides, all I would do is make a fool of myself." Hardly then does the narrator-character celebrate something in particular: "Oh blessed North Sea, a real sea with clean and merciful tides, not like the murky and smelly Mediterranean!" Much later, we read how swimming in the "swim every day, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the rain, and I began to feel soaked with sea water as if the water were piercing my skin." The North Sea, which Iris Murdoch loves, is a small and clean sea, as her character says, but also stormy, with waves that over the generations have swept hundreds of seas into the Atlantic Ocean—a wonderful expression—and lies between the British, Danish, and Norwegian coasts. Celtic, which lies in the south, nor of the Atlantic Ocean, which lies northwest of Ireland and forms the North Channel. Not far from these shores was Innisfree, the small Irish village imagined by John Ford in the film The quiet man and reimagined decades later by José Luis Guerin in another mesmerizing film, titled precisely InnisfreeIn both, Maureen O'Hara and John Wayne celebrate wildly, but in Guerin's they do so off-screen.

No one knows who Homer was, if he was anyone. There is a theory that it is not a proper name, but a collective one, under which a group of authors would have gathered together to collect the narrative materials that make up the Iliad and theOdyssey and would have shaped them, delimited the structure of each of the poems in songs, and polished their hexameters, over the centuries. It seems that, etymologically, the name Homer could come from a word, Omaros, belonging to Aeolian, one of the dialects of ancient Greek, which would mean hostage, either garment. And that the authors grouped under the name of Homer would be the Homerides, literally children of the hostages, or in other words, descendants of prisoners of war. Given that we are talking about the times in which the transition from oral to written transmission of literary texts took place, these Homerids could have been tasked with memorizing epic poems and ensuring their survival. There is no way to verify the veracity of the hypothesis of this type of semi-secret society of men, but it must be admitted that it is stimulating. Now, the idea that he was a bard born in Athens, or Argos, or Smyrna, or Ithaca like Ulysses himself, eight centuries before Christ, and that he was a blind man with a white beard and hair, as the most established tradition establishes, is undoubtedly also entirely satisfactory.

The Iliad It tells the last 51 days of the Trojan War, a war for love, since it breaks out mainly as a consequence of the kidnapping of Helen of Sparta by the Trojans, and has as its main theme the anger of Achilles, the hero protagonist.Odyssey tells the adventures of Ulysses—also called Odysseus—, warrior and king of Ithaca, on his return home after the Trojan War. In Book XXII of the Iliad, Achilles kills Hector as revenge for the murder of his beloved Patroclus, and in the Catalan version by Pau Sabaté we read it like this: "Divine Achilles rushed forward and drove his spear / and the point, from side to side, pierced his tender neck, / cutting his throat / so that he could speak to him and could answer with words." On the other hand, in book XV ofOdyssey, the swineherd Eumeus welcomes a vagabond into his hut, unaware that it is his longed-for king, Ulysses, who has arrived in Ithaca and who, after dinner, says these words (which we read in the Catalan of Joan Francesc Mira): "Now, Eumeus, and all the other companions, listen to me / understand me, so as not to be a burden to you all." What comes next is the reunion with his son, Telemachus, with his wife, Penelope, and the slaughter of the suitors who aspired to usurp Ulysses' throne.

These two poems are the pillars upon which all Western literature is built: the stories we have told ourselves, the ones we still tell ourselves today, and the ones we will foreseeably tell ourselves in the future, if the ominous omen of the burning sea doesn't come true. In these two poems, there is a substantive part of who we are as a civilization, as a culture, regardless of the language we speak, the religion we profess, or the color of our skin. We are united by the sea, that turbid and malodorous sea—as Iris Murdoch aptly wrote—that is the Mediterranean, and which is also contained in our two founding poems. It is our Homeric sea, the waters and the mud and the winds and the slime that nourish us. The suffering of Helen, the anger of Achilles, the strength of Agamemnon, the intelligence of Penelope, the cunning of Ulysses, the horror of the Cyclops and the lotus eaters and the sirens and Circe and Calypso and Scylla and Charybdis.

This Mediterranean corral, as the poet Damià Huguet called it, in which we live and challenge ourselves, comes from afar and has the life to go much further still. We, the inhabitants of the Mediterranean corral, have the sea in a sack, as Damià Huguet himself aptly wrote. The immensity of the sea strangely matches human smallness and the grandeur of our loves. This is corroborated by Saint-John Perse and Derek Walcott, both born in the Antilles. Through them we know that the Caribbean is another Mediterranean, that the sea is always the sea as a lover is always a lover. Of Walcott we can read Omeros, a modern version of the Iliad in which Hector and Achilles are not heroes, but fishermen, and Helen, a black maid. And Saint-John Perse, from his poem Invocation, gives us a verse to conclude this writing: "I have seen smiling, within the darkness of the immense, a great jewel: the Sea in celebration of our dreams..."