Excerpt from Dark, Salt, Clear by Lamorna Ash, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In that second, however, alone outside the wheelhouse, I witness the green flash. I raise my camera up to capture it and in the second between my seeing the flash and placing the viewfinder up to my eye, the sun is its ordinary white-yellow. I continue to stare right at the sun until it gets too bright and I must look away, the dark spot it leaves on my retina sliding across my sightline like a fly.

While en route to the Brazilian port of Santos in 1943, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss reflected on the difficulties of producing the rising and setting of the sun, as seen from a ship, into adequate expression. 'If I could find a language in which to perpetuate those appearances, at once so unstable and so resistant to description, if it were granted to me to be able to communicate to others the phrases and sequences of a unique event which would never recur in the same terms, then – so it seemed to me – I should in one go have discovered the deepest secrets of my profession,' he wrote.

There are rarely words good enough to describe the very best things, as there are few appropriate for the very worst. It is not impossible to describe a green flash at sunrise, as it is not impossible to articulate a tragedy at sea. But our words miss something. Language can only ever be a metonym for the universe, evading our absolute description of it, as the sea evades absolute containment by man.

Excerpted from Dark, Salt, Clear by Lamorna Ash. Copyright © 2020 by Lamorna Ash. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.