The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, October 6, 2025

Notably: The Mediterranean itself is not a world heritage site, but it is awash in them–Dubrovnik, Valletta, Ibiza, Naples, Byblos and Tyre in my old Lebanon, Corfu, Rhodes, Venice, Tetouan, so many more. Growing up, as we’d so often drive by its jaggedy raggedy coast between Beirut and Junieh or Byblos, rarely further north (I don’t remember more than one trip to Tripoli nearer the Syrian border, though it wasn’t much more than the distance between Palm Coast and Daytona Beach) I did not associate the Mediterranean with its meaning in historical etymology–the middle sea, long before Tolkien plagiarized his middle earth from us. I associated it with the sounds its name suggested to me when mixed with the sights of refineries and factories we drove past, and the odd refugee camp. For some reason Méditerranée sounded the way “Meadowlands” would come to sound to me only a few years later–nothing middle, nothing meadowy, everything fuely, fumey, polluted, chaotic, dieselish (Lebanon was big on diesel for home heating: it was my morning’s perfume). I’m not knocking it: I loved those drives, loved the sights, loved the wavelets though I wished the sea had more of an oceanic fury about it, ever knowing until recently that it is in its depth and various shores more treacherous than the Pacific, the Bermuda Triangle or the Mississippi at their worst. It is a giving sea, the only sea wrapped by three continents, a cradle of pluralism in every sense–cultural, political, religious, ecological. It is the cradle of my memories, of those mornings of joy as we drove up to our mountain home, listening to Tom Jones or Becaud or the Beatles, and those evenings of sorrow and dread as we headed home, usually on Sundays, usually before I had to recite out loud in class one of those awful poems in Arabic that had me in my own circle of hell, since I could never memorize what I hated: I’d look at glimpses of the Mediterranean, between one smokestack or another, count the twinkles of container ships awaiting that call into the Poirt of Beirut, and wish Monday away. I didn’t know that I was looking at  a sea fulgurant with the legends and elegies of Homer, Virgil, Jules Michelet, Jules Verne, Fernand Braudel. I had to go very far from my cradle to discover it all. The ironies of exile: we only really learn about what we love most long after we have left it, and when returning is a Thomas Wolfe epigram.

—P.T.

The Mediterranean, the blue sea par excellence, the “great sea” of the Hebrews, the “sea” of the Greeks, the mare nostrum of the Romans, bordered by orange trees, aloes, cacti, maritime pines, embalmed with the scent of myrtles, framed by harsh mountains, saturated with pure and transparent air, but incessantly worked by the fires of the earth, is a veritable battlefield where Neptune and Pluto are still fighting over the empire of the world. It is there, on its shores and on its waters, says Michelet, that man immerses himself in one of the most powerful climates on the globe.

–From Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870).

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