On the Art of Staying at the Seaside

A MEDITATION AT EASTBOURNE

To stay at the seaside properly, one should not think. But even in
staying at the seaside there are intervals, waking moments when meals
come, even if there are no appointed meal-times. Moreover, now and then,
one must go to buy tobacco, a matter one can trust to no hireling, lest
he get it dry. It cannot be always seaside, even as it cannot be always
May, and through the gaps thought creeps in. Going over the cliff and
along the parade, and down by the circulating library to the cigar
divan, where they sell Parique tobacco, the swinging of one's legs seems
to act like a pendulum to the clockwork of one's brain. One meditates
all the way, and chiefly on how few people there are who can really--to
a critical adept--be said to stay at the seaside.

People seem to think that one can take a ticket to Eastbourne, or
Bognor, or Ventnor, and come and stay at the seaside straight away, just
as I have known new-hatched undergraduates tell people they were going
to play billiards. Thousands and thousands of people think they have
stayed at the seaside, and have not, just as thousands of people
erroneously imagine they have played whist. For the latter have played
not whist, but Bumble-puppy, and the former have only frequented a
watering-place for a time. Your true staying at the seaside is an art,
demanding not only railway fares but special aptitude, and, moreover,
needing culture, like all worthy arts.

The most insurmountable difficulty of the beginner is the classical
simplicity of the whole thing. To stay at the seaside properly you just
spread yourself out on the extreme edge of the land and let the sunlight
soak in. Your eyes are fixed upon the horizon. Some have it that your
head should be towards the sea, but the best authorities think that this
determines blood to that region, and so stimulates thought. This is all
the positive instruction; the rest is prohibition. You must not think,
and you must not move, neither may you go to sleep. In a few minutes the
adept becomes as a god, even as a god that sits upon the lotus leaf. New
light and colour come into the sky and sea, and the surges chant his
praises. But those who are not of the elect get pins and needles all
over them.

It must be freely admitted that staying at the seaside such as this,
staying at the seaside in its perfection, is a thing for a select few.
You want a broad stretch of beach and all the visible sea to yourself.
You cannot be disturbed by even the most idyllic children trying to bury
you with sand and suchlike playfulness, nor by boatloads of the
democracy rowing athwart your sea and sky. And the absence of friend or
wife goes without saying. I notice down here a very considerable
quantity