UNDA

You began in water.

For nine months before your first breath you floated in it, warm and dark, hearing the world through it. Long before that, some four billion years ago, the first living cells formed in the oceans of a young planet. Every animal that later crawled onto land carried a little of that sea inside itself. Your blood is still salty.

Thales of Miletus is usually called the first philosopher. He lived in the sixth century BC on the coast of Asia Minor, in a trading town full of sailors, and he is the first Greek we know of who tried to explain the world without calling on the gods. His answer was water. Everything, he said, comes from it.

For a man without a microscope it was a remarkable guess. Water freezes into something hard, melts into something that flows, rises as vapour and falls as rain. It carries seeds, feeds roots, shapes coastlines. If you were looking for one substance that could become everything else, water was the obvious candidate. Recent research even suggests that some of the water on Earth may be older than the Sun.

Stand at the edge of the sea and watch a wave come in. It looks as though the water is travelling towards you across the whole ocean. What actually travels is energy. The water itself mostly rises and falls in place, turning in small circles, and the wave passes on through it.

A wave is energy passing through water. The water stays where it was.

That is a useful picture for a life. Things pass through us: joy, grief, a sudden idea, a year of hard work. They lift us, sometimes very high. Then they move on, and we settle back into ourselves, a little changed, but still here.

The Latin words in this track follow the same movement. Unda surgit, the wave rises. Unda redit, the wave returns. There is nothing dramatic in them. They describe the oldest rhythm on the planet, one that was already running long before anyone was there to hear it.

Thales is said to have predicted an eclipse and to have measured the height of the pyramids from their shadows. He is also said to have fallen into a well while staring at the stars. Both stories fit a man who looked very hard at the world and occasionally forgot where he was standing.

UNDA begins where he began, at the water's edge, with the simplest question there is: where does everything come from?

— Thales of Miletus, c. 624–546 BC