Nose pressed to the glass, we watch mist clouds roll wetly off the Pacific onto the beach and when we get to the point of exposing our own flesh to the elements — mostly water in various incarnations and sand — we remark that this feels like the memory of an amniotic bath, except that it’s cool not warm, even though we know that we can’t have this memory, couldn’t possibly, though we don’t abandon it because we like the metaphor, the need it expresses and our need to express it.

The visual “play” outside that window all week is why we come, every bit as much as entering those scenes ourselves, nudging long strands of kelp and other sea “trash” left at high tide or feeling that chilly north Pacific nipping at our ankles and, watch out, knees and thighs. Everyone who comes here is affected about the same way, yes? Sky, surf, land in perpetual rearrangement, sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic, three elastic elements readjusting to each other. You don’t have to watch every second, that’s not necessary — but every short while you look up and locate the difference, how the pattern has changed.

I’m not sure what this has to do with Titian, or specifically the two Titians that the 7th Duke of Sutherland (only seven?) is hoping to sell to “balance his portfolio.” These are great paintings, no doubt, and the Duke is willing to sell them to the UK’s National Gallery for one-third the price they would likely bring at auction, which is estimated to be 300 million pounds. And the scrambling for money and the gnashing of teeth over the public interest in keeping the paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland, where they have lived since 1945, has been intense and reminiscent of Philadelphia’s citywide debate over the future of Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic, which was headed to Arkansas until $68 million was raised to keep it where it was.

The bidding at auction for these paintings would be intense, I’m sure, if they ever hit the block. The Getty Museum would love them and has lots of resources, Las Vegas beckons, but my bet would be on the petro-dollars accumulating in the Middle East. At this point, though, if not before, the Titians cease to be paintings and become trophies, a set of particularly impressive antlers on the wall that remind the viewer more of the hunt that anything else.

The paintings, the viewers who casually or intently scan them, the marketplace. Let’s see: the paintings are the sky, the viewers are the sea, the marketplace is the land? It doesn’t work. I can’t make the parts congruent with the view outside my window. Not even close. This isn’t to denigrate the paintings: Diana and Actaeon is fabulous and we wonder, does Actaeon know what’s coming? The punishment that awaits him for viewing the goddess? The trespass he has committed? Or is he, alive in the world, simply bamboozled by the view he has stumbled upon? I like that: Alive in the world one minute, turned into a stag the next, and then slaughtered by one’s own dogs.

Well, I like the “alive in the world” bit at least, because that’s what the painting reminds me of. So I suppose would the antlers and definitely the view outside the window at the beach. I, the observer now and the actor later, am alive in the world. And when I encounter the goddess, my negotiation will go better.