From the beach to the page

The weather is right for it. He even predisposes to it. The first heats of spring, excessive and premature, naturally lead to wanting to go to the beach, at least to dreaming about it. The “bridges” of May, ticked on the diaries from winter, poured the first bathers, impatient to do battle after months of waiting for this moment.

Never mind the seasons and the latitudes. Grégory Le Floch is unique in that he only manages to write on the beach. He pays his share to this snobbery of the pen by a “praise of the beach” light work, a little relaxed as befits on the languid shores. History, readings, theories, observations and experiences feed his elegy. At home, page and beach merge.

Our author notes that at the water’s edge the hours become approximate, uncertain, freed from the obligation to be exact. The beach attracts and leaves the mind free to wander as it pleases. It imposes nothing. We eat there, we lounge there, we read there, we sleep there and we change positions as in our bed. The beach is also a dining room. Moreover, the bathers are always less numerous than the bodies lying on the sand.

If the place seems natural to us today, it was not always so. Too long the beach has been dreaded. The murderous oceans threw back the wretched people who had been swallowed up. Until the 18th century, the Diafoirus advised against approaching it so as not to expose yourself to its “unhealthy exhalations”. Only the mad and the neurotic had access to it to purge their excess nerves.

But, in 1750, Dr. Richard Russel, a good doctor from Great Britain, decreed, from the height of his science, that the sea was to be eaten and drunk. Everything that emanated from it was wholesome and invigorating.

We therefore eagerly followed his prescriptions, which freed us from deep-rooted fears. Brighton was the first seaside town to open a seaside nursing home. We know the rest. “In a century, the coast, so hostile and threatening in the eyes of men, has become an ideal life for part of the planet”, explains the author. We even carry the beach with us when we move away from it, in our shoes, on our skin, as in our mind.

The beach, insists Grégory Le Floch, is therefore indeed “a human invention”. But it is threatened today by the sand mafia which strips it of its raw material to make cement. The numbers put forward are staggering. And global warming tends to erase it by rising waters.

Let’s bathe quickly, while there is still time.

Source