There is a fashion across online and social media for sharing quotes from famous or anonymous folk. There are a couple that I see quite regularly, including the E.E. Cummings line, ‘For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) / it’s always ourselves we find in the sea’ from the 1956 poem, maggie and molly and milly and may, and Leonard Cohen’s words about how ‘there’s a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in’ from Anthem. These sentiments become so common to see that sometimes it can seem the words have almost lost their power and become cliché, with any wisdom they once held now lost in their ubiquity.
For ocean lovers though, one quotation stands above them all. One has been repeated with such prolific consistency across blogs, websites, social media, and greeting cards by those drawing a link to the healing qualities of seas and the ocean that I know it by heart. It usually appears something like this (although often without the punctuation and rarely with the author’s name):
‘The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears or the sea.’ Isak Dinesan
Despite thinking blood is a significant omission from this list, I can understand why this appears so often in online media associated with surfers. It’s immersive and salty and raw. It’s simple and proactive. It’s a lovely turn of phrase. But it’s also everywhere! As someone who has written about surfing and the sea for some years now, I get sent this quotation a lot – via emails, cards, and social media posts. It’s nice that people think of me when they see these lines, and that they take the time to share them with me. I see it so often now, that I’d accepted these words as something real and true, as though they’d always existed, fully formed. I’d never once stopped to wonder who Isak Dinesen is? When did he write these words? Where is this line from? What’s the context? But suddenly, I was curious.
I took my questions straight to a search engine. Within seconds I had discovered a number of things, not the least being that the name, Isak Dinesan, is (among others) a nom de plume for Danish writer, Karen Blixen, who is the author of ‘Out of Africa’, and an alleged twice short-listed nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 and 1957 (the awards went to Ernest Hemmingway and Albert Camus respectively). Blixen’s used of the name Isak Dinesan was a crafty move by a writer keen to crack an American audience. ‘Isak’ is clever because while for English speakers it is a masculine gendered name, in Scandinavia, it is not. ‘Dinesan’ is less crafty – it is her pre-marriage family name.
So all this time, that-often-shared-by-surfers line attributed to someone I assumed was a man was written by a woman. And maybe that a woman wrote those words shouldn’t matter to me. But considering the continued absence of women in the surfing record and that, more broadly, women often had to write under masculine names to even be published, it does mean something. In fact, it means a lot.
After recovering from learning that a woman wrote such enduring, significant words, I moved on to seeking out where the line was from. The words originally appear in a short story called The Deluge of Norderney, in a book of short stories called Seven Gothic Tales, published in England and America in 1934. At the time, Blixen/Dinesan’s book was a best seller in the USA and was highly regarded by all kinds of readers.
I’d never heard of it before but one more website visit, and a copy of the book was on its way to me.
Once I had it in hand, I found out that the short story is quite long and sad. Long and sad, but full of love. It has lies, but also selflessness. There is romance and courage, honesty and deception; affection, a flood, a dog, drowning, sacrifice, and death. Its stories within a story of people facing their separate pasts as they face the end of their lives, together. It offers much to think about.
But you know what it doesn’t have? That famous line. It has all the words in those combinations, but not as the succinct phrase that has become so familiar and famous.
Instead the words emerge through a conversation between a (possible) father and son. The older man is offering advice to the young man who feels lost and abandoned through circumstance and by the rich folk who have, until recently, doted on and patronised him. The men’s relationship is not hostile but is one of distance and a lack of attachment due, in part, to a father who works at sea. The father’s words feel wise and based in experience, but at the same time his saltwater solution of crying and work and the open ocean feel like a trap.
“I believe you are unhappy, Jonathan,” he said.
“I am unhappy, Father, “ I said. “I have loved this town and the people in it. I have drunk them down with delight. But they have some poison in them which I cannot stand. If I think of them now, I vomit up in my soul. Do you know of a cure for me?’
“Why yes,” he said, “I know of a cure for everything: salt water.”
“Salt water?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, “in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
I said, “I have tried sweat and tears. The salt sea I meant to try, but a woman in black lace prevented me.”
“You speak wildly, Jonathan,” he said.
“You might come with me,” he said after a little time. “I am bound for St Petersburg.”
“No,” I said, “to St Petersburg I will not go.”
“Well,” he said, “I am bound for it. But go and get well while I am there, for you are looking very sick. I will take you when I come back, into the open sea.”
“I cannot stay in Copenhagen,” I said.
“Good,” he said, “go to some place of which the doctors can tell you, and I will pick you up at Hamburg.”
‘And in this way, My Lord, and Miss Nat-og-Dag,’ the young man said, ‘I was sent here, by skipper Maersk, whether he be my father or not, to get cured by salt water.
(from The Deluge at Norderney)
This is a bit of a way from ‘The cure for everything is salt water – sweat, tears and the sea’. Not miles away, but a way. It is perhaps made a little more complex in that poor Jonathan himself faces death by drowning even as he recalls these words as, perhaps, does his father as he sails far offshore on cold northern seas. Perhaps, knowing where the story was to lead, this contradiction was knowingly written through by Blixen as she made this point. The sea can save you, even as it can kill you.
The way we are presented with this saltwater sentiment today is decontextualised, simplified, and rendered in a typewriter font that is removed from the heartbreak of the water that floods the original story. Her words weren’t intended as a sentiment about maintaining wellness or self-care, but were instead about an ethic of work and place and resilience, and possibly even of running away.
Reviewers and historians wrote that the wordy, formal language in, The Deluge at Norderney, is consistent with Blixen’s ‘old fashioned style’ of storytelling. Apparently, ‘Blixen mentioned in several interviews that she wanted to express a spirit that no longer existed in modern times, that of destiny and courage; a spirit of being rather than doing’.* Perhaps that we should run towards pre-destined fates, rather than imagine possible futures for ourselves? This is not an idea that works with my own atheist world view and does not seem one that reflects what I have read in the famous line emerging with the story.
And yet, does any of that matter? Does it matter that the meaning we ascribe to the line we know so well has emerged in our reimagination of the original lines? Her words, re-ordered, have come to have a significance on their own, in a form that makes sense in a time of shareable social media posts. We should critique that, but also we need to recognise that ideas and art are reinterpreted and reimagined all the time.
I don’t know exactly how Blixen’s sentences got lost to become a pop culture sentiment of Isak Dinesen, but it’s certainly been fun to learn where these words came from and what else they can mean. It’s been fun to come to know a whole other book, story, and writer through the most famous line from her work – one she never even really wrote.
*I started writing this piece of writing in 2016, and I can see in my notes that the way this sentiment is expressed on Wikipedia has changed from, ‘she wanted to express a spirit that no longer existed in modern times, that of destiny and courage’ to be ‘she wanted to express a spirit that no longer existed in modern times, one of being rather than doing’. I’m not sure what this change suggests, but it’s really interesting to note how interpretations shift over time.
Some more things to read:
De Laine, Michael (2016). Karen Blixen: Twice the Nobel bridesmaid but never the bride, The Copen Hagen Post, September 20
Stecher-Hansen, Marianne (2006). “Picturing Karen Blixen—Artist, Charlatan, Heretic, and Iconoclast: European Storyteller in the American Marketplace” (PDF). The Bridge. 29 (2): 25–41. ISSN 0741-1200. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016.
Walter, Eugene (Autumn 1956). “Isak Dinesen, The Art of Fiction”. The Paris Review (14). ISSN 0031-2037. Retrieved 20 November 2016.
Thanks for the discussion Bec – a “quote” I was unfamiliar with that you unpacked so effectively. It always pays to check sources carefully. The “quote” itself obviously rings deeply with salt water “people”, in all forms.