During the several years that I researched The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach, I immersed myself in our cultural obsession with the beach. One byproduct of this obsession that kept me perpetually entertained: the writers major and minor the world over who have taken up the challenge to finally describe the ocean satisfactorily. Here, I’ve collected some of the best and most amusing attempts I’ve come across.
[T]he beach itself is still the real draw, replete with gentle, kid-friendly water in Rothko bands of blue…
-Richard Fausset, writing of the Florida Panhandle beaches in the New York Times
Thousands of travellers…hurry southwards…to bathe in the ultramarine waters of the Mediterranean.”
-from Cook’s Handbook to the Health Resorts of the South of France, Riviera, and Pyrenees, published in 1905
…the invented part of the Murphys’ lives is as real, as palpable, as…the color of the sea–an improbable turquoise in the shallows, and a deep, purplish blue, the color of blueberries, farther out.
-Amanda Viall, in her biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, Everybody Was So Young
…a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Tender Is the Night
The Western Caribbean’s blue varied between baby-blanket and fluorescent.
-David Foster Wallace, in the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again“
Scanning the wine-dark sea he prayed in anguish…”
Homer, in The Iliad
No neighbors just solitude. Sandy white beaches with gin-colored water.
Airbnb listing for a campsite on the island of Cayo Costa, off the Gulf Coast of Florida
Before me, the ocean was the color of steel.
Sheila Heiti, in How Should a Person Be
The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.
Virginia Woolf, in The Waves
Jamaica, where the water was the color of nude aquamarine.
Patricia Lockwood, in No One is Talking About This
