Beneath us lie the lights of the herring fleet. The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.

In the seventh section, Rhoda travels to Spain, where she has this vision of the ocean from high atop a cliff. The scene is beautiful but ominous, and there is a double meaning to Rhoda’s statements about touching and seeing “nothing.” That is, what she is seeing and touching in this scene is nothingness, nonexistence. Rhoda is imagining the dissolution of her body into the larger body of the sea. The symbolic value of the “waves” is clearly active here as well—Rhoda knows she is constantly being dissolved by the passage of time anyway, and she is strongly tempted to give in to the process. As it happens, Rhoda does not give in to the temptation here, but this scene is a kind of harbinger of future events and a portrait of the drift of Rhoda’s mind. It also serves as a kind of counterpoint to the scene in which Bernard, also looking down upon the ocean, sees the porpoise break the surface. In his case, meaning and life come welling up from below, while Rhoda imagines herself being sucked under by meaninglessness and death.