And I remember shore rocks white with barnacles as far as the eye can see, or the spectacle of an immense school of jellyfish, mile after mile, with seemingly no end to the pulsing, ghostly forms, scarcely more substantial than the water itself.
And the movie audience, like the 19th-century novel-reading public, can relish, with only slight queasiness, the sadomasochistic spectacle of boarding school cruelty.
The French confronted the surprising spectacle of high school students demanding pensions.
However, there may be some schadenfreude going on when he talks about enjoying a "gloriously gritty, sloppy spectacle of old-school football" from the comfort of his armchair at home: "Many fans will have paid a small fortune to shiver in their seats".
Designed by Brazil's legendary architect Oscar Niemeyer, the Sambadrome was originally constructed during the first government of Leonel Brizola (1983 198787) in an effort to provide Rio with an urban facility that would serve as the permanent location of the traditional spectacle of the samba school's parade.
It may also say something about modern debate that the most teeth-grinding aspect of Osborne's move barely attracted comment – but the spectacle of an alumnus of St Paul's School worth an estimated £4m kicking the poor in order to preserve his political skin is irksome, to say the least.
To begin with, there's the atmosphere, excitement and sheer gladiatorial spectacle of big-time high school football, which in Texas, where teams routinely charter jets to travel to their games, is big time on a scale that may seem boggling to other parts of the country.
We swam in its invisible currents, like a school of bizarre fish wearing stylishly outmoded spectacles and T-shirts of long-forgotten cartoons.
It was a school field kind of spectacle at times – scruffy, naive, mindless; two groups of players conceding possession time and time over and one of them scrambling home with the afternoon's singular moment of class.
It feels like I'm some kind of spectacle, like "goats at school" or "babies in a marathon".
