Nothing that happens on the surface of the sea can alter the calm of its depths

The sea has no renewal, no forgetting,
no variety of death,
is silent with the silence of a single note.

They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them.

The sea never changes and its works, for all the talk of men, are wrapped in mystery.

A smooth sea never a skilled sailor made.

A lake
Is a river curled and asleep like a snake.

The sea ebbs and flows, but the rock remains unmoved.

The salamanders,
like tiny birds, locked into formation,
fly down into the endless mysteries

of the transforming water,
and how could anyone believe
that anything in this world
is only what it appears to be — that anything is ever final — that anything, in spite of its absence,
ever dies
a perfect death?

(from the poem 'What Is It?')

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved…

We fish rest quietly, on all sides supported, within an element which all the time accurately and unfailingly evens itself out. An element which may be said to have taken over our personal experience, in as much as, regardless of individual shape and whether we be flat fish or round fish, our weight and body and calculated according to the quantity of our surroundings which we displace...We run no risks. For our changing of place in existence never creates, or leaves after it, what man calls a way, upon which phenomenon - in reality no phenomenon but an illusion - he will waste inexplicable passionate deliberation. Man, in the end, is alarmed by the idea of time, and unbalanced by incessant wanderings between past and future.

A fish is the last to see that it’s swimming in a substance called water.

Waterbirds
come and go,
their traces disappear — yet they never
forget their path.

You do not notice changes in what is always before you.