Nature & Animals Quote by John C. Hawkes

The line turns a familiar comfort into a scale nightmare: even if you belong in the water "like a fish", the presence of an "enormous ocean liner" makes that intimacy feel irrelevant. Hawkes is less interested in literal nautical danger than in a psychological truth he keeps circling in his fiction: environments don’t just hold us, they dwarf us. The simile promises ease and natural belonging, then yanks it away with industrial mass. Fear arrives not because the water is alien, but because the human-made intrudes with a different physics - indifferent, unstoppable, unseeingly lethal.

The phrasing is slyly destabilizing. "Anywhere near" expands the threat radius; you don’t need contact for catastrophe. "Enormous" is blunt, almost childlike, which makes the terror feel primal rather than intellectual. Then Hawkes slips in a paradox: you are "just like a fish in the water", yet you’re frightened. That "just" matters. It shrinks the self, reduces agency, suggests a creature built for a medium that still offers no protection against machinery. Nature is not sanctuary when power has changed the stakes.

In context, Hawkes wrote through the long shadow of mechanized war and mid-century American bigness: systems, institutions, technologies that operate at scales the individual can’t negotiate. The ocean liner becomes a floating emblem of modernity - luxurious from afar, predatory up close - and the fish becomes the person who thought they were adapted, only to discover adaptation isn’t the same as safety.