Four
Few things speak so clearly of the infinite as a bank of clouds over a restless, churning sea. The ocean is unsettled; both ephemerally rolling and eternally inert in turn. It is always the same, it is never the same.
I am an engineer in this telling. That’s the mask I wear. I seek to engineer a role for the ocean in the narrative of design, capturing that view of the water stretching out to the far horizon providing endless comfort (by contrast to my homely surroundings) as well as a never-ending vista of inhospitable, elemental, turmoil. The exposure to that harshness is total, and yet mediated, damped.
But nothing will hold the ocean back. The future is already written, it just has to happen. The climate is changing and the sea’s rolling edge is encroaching ever higher on the land’s end. In the meantime, the auteurs practice their art and a thousand beautiful interiors bloom. But to what end? These efforts are not pointless, gratefully received as they are. And yet they are to be rendered trivial. This will happen sooner rather than later.
Nothing will ultimately escape the gentle but relentless touch of that encroaching finger of salty water, moving millimetres each turning year, ever upwards.
