On Chesil Beach Chesil Beach looks artificial but isnt.

It is an amazing natural phenomenon, eighteen miles of pebble beach forming an unbroken barrier between sea and land from West Bay to Portland Bill. I was at West Bay the other day and saw the beach stretching away towards the silhouette of Portland Bill, which does indeed look like a sea creatures bill pointing inland. Chesil Beach creates the brackish Fleet Lagoon and Abbotsbury Swannery. It shelters inland villages and the port of Weymouth. In fact its a large part of the reason those places are there at all. On the Beach itself, tides and currents continually sort and distribute the stones, from sandy and pea-sized in the west to the size of your fist toward Portland. It is said that smugglers coming ashore at night could tell instantly exactly where they were by the size and type of pebble underfoot. Everything in the natural world is where it is for a reason. Even when humankind comes along and builds dams and barriers, cities and towns on flood plains, nuclear plants on geological faults, the natural world will have its way. We inhabit a planet which we underestimate if we deem it fragile. Earth can be seen as a living organism constantly adjusting itself to preserve its continuity, which will not necessarily be advantageous for humankind. There is a novel called On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. Its 1962 and two young people face the first night of their honeymoon together. Remember so far as sex goes (and very much else) this was another era. Philip Larkin wrote Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me)Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles first LP. Sparing you the details, the couple are beset by inhibitions and misunderstandings and everything ends very badly. All the while on the beach the endless processes of shifting and sorting the pebbles continues in its rhythmic natural way. There is a contrast here between the self-conscious, fumbling and confused behaviour of the human actors and the deeply enduring processes of the natural world. If only, you might think, we could all behave in a natural way. The couple should simply have thrown off their clothes and got on with it. That of course was both the DH Lawrence solution and the story of the later sixties, at least in some parts of the culture. In with spontaneity and self-expression, away with tradition and social convention. I am afraid it didnt work. Human attitudes and values are inherited within a culture just as is our language. We are extremely malleable and suggestible from birth onwards. If we try to throw off the ways of mum and dad we probably make equal and opposite mistakes. So, is it any answer at all to say that we ought to behave in accordance with our human nature? Religious traditions generally give an account of human nature as participating in the divine. A Christian metaphor favoured by Quakers is that of the Light and the Darkness within. As thinking, reflective creatures human beings are blessed with the capacity to discern what is right and good. But we are also vulnerable to error and mistakes great and small. We need the right conditions to carry out these discernments and for Quakers this starts in collective reverent silence and continues into daily life. It is never complete. In the wake of the success of On Chesil Beach Ian McEwan appeared on BBC Radio 4. He confessed to revisiting the Beach and to having taken home some pebbles for his mantlepiece.

There was a considerable protest at this vandalism and he contritely returned them. But did it matter that half a dozen stones were taken away, out of the 180 billion on the beach? And did it matter where exactly he placed them?