Underwater Swimming Quotes

All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.

The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You’re in eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

What do you miss about being alive?" The sound of my mom singing, a little off-key. The way my dad went to all my swim meets and I could hear his whistle when my head was underwater, even if he did yell at me afterward for not trying harder. I miss going to the library. I miss the smell of clothes fresh out of the dryer. I miss diving off the highest board and nailing the landing. I miss waffles" - p. 272.

But I think sometimes a person has to be forced underwater to see if they're going to drown or swim.

It's like swimming, underwater, this whole year. I just close my eyes. hold my breath, and keep kicking.

We’re going to swim it.” I flipped forward a few pages. “Underwater.” Jenks blinked. “Rache, you gotta stop using that sugar substitute.Under the water? Do you know how cold it is?

I don't know why it is that one kind of dark can be so different from another. Real dark is thicker and quieter, it fills up the space between your jacket and your heart. It gets in your eyes. When I have to be out late at night, it's not knives and kicks I'm afraid of, though there are plenty of those behind walls and hedges. I'm afraid of the Dark. You, who walk so cheerfully, whistling your way, stand still for five minutes. Stand still in the Dark in a field or down a track. It's then you know you're there on sufferance. The Dark only lets you take one step at a time. Step and the Dark closes round your back. In front, there is no space for you until you take it. Darkness is absolute. Walking in the Dark is like swimming underwater except you can't come up for air.

Well... I love moving in extra dimensions. Not just backwards and forwards, but up and down and around. And fins. I love swimming with fins— human feet are practically useless underwater. I love all the unique things you see on each dive. Millions of little aquatic soap operas playing out between all the creatures. And the silence. Well, it’s not really silent down there, but the roar of bubbles blocks any other sound...

I am the Mister Rogers Bannister of swimming coaches for ducks. My services are available in underwater vending machines in ponds all across The Ozarks.

Po swirled upward from where it had been sitting, and floated over to the window. "When you go swimming and you put your head under the water," Po said, "and everything is strange and underwater-sounding, and strange and underwater-looking, you don't miss the air do you? You don't miss the above-water sounds and the above-water look. It's just different." "True." Liesl was quiet for a moment. Then she added, "But I bet you'd miss it if you were drowning. I bet you'd really miss the air then.

...I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ...

Then he tells his son, "This feels like that breath you take after coming up from a long swim underwater. The most gorgeous feeling, that sip of air you feared you'd never have again." He looks at Compass, and touches his cheek, gently. "Surfacing," he says.

I noticed again the bruised oaks nearby, and their gallant attempts to flourish as if their scars didn't exist. "Why did some of the oaks die and some survive?" Aimee gave me an elegant one-shoulder shrug. "Why do some people stay after a hurricane and why do some never come back?" She looked at me, her eyes measuring. "Why do some people continue to search for the missing, and others give up? I don't know. But I think sometimes a person has to be forced underwater to see if they're going to drown or swim.

But it’s like swimming underwater, you know? At first you feel as though you could go along forever, seeing everything from this new perspective, but eventually you have to come up for air.

I’d never actually talked to a deaf person before but I’d been swimming and gotten water stuck in my ears lots of times, felt that underwater silence as I shook my head and watched people’s mouths moving without hearing the words, so I knew what it was like for her. I could empathize.

You don’t see yourself at all, do you? It seems to me that you’re good at everything you try,” said Ethan sincerely. “I had a dream I could breathe underwater,” I said flippantly, “Maybe I’ll go swim with the mermaids.” Ethan turned to look at me with shock in his eyes. “Just kidding,” I said, alarmed at his reaction

There, at a depth to which divers would find it difficult to descend, are caverns, haunts, and dusky mazes, where monstrous creatures multiply and destroy each other. Huge crabs devour fish and are devoured in their turn. Hideous shapes of living things, not created to be seen by human eyes wander in this twilight. Vague forms of antennae, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, and claws, float about there, quivering, growing larger, or decomposing and perishing in the gloom, while horrible swarms of swimming things prowl about seeking their prey. To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

But more often there are regular people in the pool. Beautiful women seniors doing water aerobics - mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers - their massive breasts and guts reminding you how it is that women carry worlds. When I swim by them I watch their legs and bodies underwater, and feel a strange kinship with a maternal lineage.

It’s been three days still haven’t heard from you. My heart lives underwater breathing for you. But you break apart my tiny heart, giving me no chance to start something with you. I dove into the pool I dove in hoping to swim now I’m drowning.

I wanted to cut for the cut itself, for the delicate severing of capillaries, the transgression of veins. I needed to cut the way your lungs scream for air when you swim the length of the pool underwater in one breath. It was a craving so organic it seemed to have arisen from my skin itself. Imagining the sticky-slick scarlet trails of my own blood soothed me. This

Feathers," he says. They ask this question at least once a week. He gives the same answer. Even over such a short time — two months, three? He's lost count — they've accumulated a stock of lore, of conjecture about him: Snowman was once a bird but he's forgotten how to fly and the rest of his feathers fell out, and so he is cold and he needs a second skin, and he has to wrap himself up. No: he's cold because he eats fish, and fish are cold. No: he wraps himself up because he's missing his man thing, and he doesn't want us to see. That's why he won't go swimming. Snowman has wrinkles because he once lived underwater and it wrinkled up his skin. Snowman is sad because the others like him flew away over the sea, and now he is all alone.

Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell.“Why, of course!” she laughed.“Then why do you do it?”“It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think, I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was you who actually did it.” “Hmm,” he said. “Well, you may ‘hmm’ as you wish,” the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. “But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?” “Yes,” he agreed. The woman shrugged. “Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?” He smiled. “I suppose not.” “You suppose correctly,” the woman said. “And why?” She looked at him, grinning. “Because it’s fun.

Sometimes I dream that I'm drowning. It's always in a big blue ocean that's too deep for me to see the bottom. But I tell myself I'm not going to die no matter how much water gets in my lungs or how deep I sink, I am not going to die. Because I say so. Suddenly, I can breathe underwater. I can swim. The ocean isn't scary anymore. It's actually kinda cool. I even learn how to control it. But I'm awake, I'm drowning, and I don't know how to control any of this.

If you are one of those lucky persons who own a pen that writes underwater, you might try living in a swimming pool.

But that's impossible. Simply getting through the day is like swimming through an underwater minefield. Tomorrow will be just as hard. And the next day.

Leo leaned forward and met her soft lips. Their first underwater kiss created bubbles that floated lazily to the surface. Audrey ran her fingers through his coarse hair, and they lingered until his lungs were bursting.

When observed from above the water, a duck moves smooth and without effort. But if you looked underwater, you'd see a paddle wheel, like one found on The Mississippi River in the year 1888, churning and being steered by a drunk Mark Twain.

I swam underwater in a warm blue sea, gliding along a rocky seafloor. Colorful schools of fish scattered before me and dolphins swimming by my side struggled to keep up the pace. Picking up speed, I soared gracefully into the entrance of a sea cave, only to be engulfed by darkness and trapped in a small space. There was a sudden oppressive weight on my chest; I struggled to catch my breath as fear rose in my heart... ~ I woke to find the quilt pulled up over my head. Pushing it back, I came face to face with Charlie, sitting squarely on my chest with his eyes closed and paws curled up under his body.

As I walked by a small pond—my reflection was looking back at me. The cloudy sky reflection makes the pond look like dark clouds are underwater. I know how that feels— mentally, it is a prison of dark forces tying your legs together as it refuses to let you kick and swim so that you can breathe. Instead, it drowns your thoughts with darkness and despair.

T he first request arrived the next day. At least I’d gotten through all my classes this time. I survived math, kept my eyes open through English, had a nap in study hall (favorite class ever), and got to meet the swim team in seventh period. The coach said our first swim meet would be on Thursday. No problem, as long as I remembered not to breathe underwater, swim at

Coming along the road towards me on his way to the covert, his head high, his body smeared all breast-deep in clay that stained the lower half of him copper ochre, came a fox hound, a pale hound. He was alone which was wrong. But being alone made him the type of all hounds that ever existed. He was running as if he'd been running all day, and he was running as if he would never stop, tongue out and eyes fixed. He was running to be with the rest of the hounds and the sound was drawing him along the rainy roads as if he were underwater and swimming up to the light to breathe. I was transfixed. I'd never seen a hound be a hound before. He was doing exactly what he needed to be doing. He was tired but joyful. He was late but getting there. Lost but catching up.

The Lanyard The other day I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room, moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly— a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning how to braid long thin plastic strips into a lanyard, a gift for my mother. I had never seen anyone use a lanyard or wear one, if that's what you did with them, but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again until I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother. She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard. She nursed me in many a sick room, lifted spoons of medicine to my lips, laid cold face-cloths on my forehead, and then led me out into the airy light and taught me to walk and swim, and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard. Here are thousands of meals, she said, and here is clothing and a good education. And here is your lanyard, I replied, which I made with a little help from a counselor. Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp. And here, I wish to say to her now, is a smaller gift—not the worn truth that you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand, I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Mehmed?” Radu called, his voice muffled and indistinct, as if Lada’s head were still underwater. She and Mehmed paused their mouth-to-mouth combat, and Lada realized her legs were wrapped around his waist, his hands around the backs of her thighs, their chests pressed together. She pushed him away, dropping beneath the water and swimming to the other side just as Radu appeared from the trees and jumped into the pool between them.

I don’t have a lot of regrets in life, but one of my biggest is that when my son Kyle was about 10 and was proudly demonstrating how many laps he could swim underwater without taking a breath, I jumped in the pool and swam one more length than he did. It was an unthinking moment, and a great demonstration of the destructive power of competitiveness. I didn’t just show up my child; I risked damaging his self-confidence and our bond.

The final part of the swim workout was “water harassment.” These days, the official, politically correct name for this training is “water confidence,” but harassment is a more accurate description. Water harassment is designed to train PJs to remain calm and effectively deal with underwater emergencies. This training also prepares students for the rigorous military scuba school later in the pipeline. As a result, PJs are exceptionally skilled and comfortable in the water.

Lots of people do not feel and do not care, deeply. They're the sea creatures who were born to swim in the shallows. And I think that they look at those of us who come from the parts of the ocean that's pitch black and deeper than the core of the planet and they feel fascinated. They're fascinated in the way we are fascinated with eagles or with vampires. They think we're unabashedly deep and beautiful and they feel like they want to try being that way, too. It's like a fascination for a mystical creature. But I have watched these kinds of people burn out before they ever reach that depth (not even close). They burn out because they just get so exhausted! You only have the set of lungs designed for the depths of the ocean, if you are the type of creature who was born in those depths. It's not a regimen, it's not a list of rules, it's not a succession of steps to get there. It's about anatomy. There are creatures for the shallows and creatures for the deep. It is nature's designer plan. And when these people burn out, they will have these outbursts wherein they lash out at you, as if they are exasperated at why you're a mermaid in the black of the seas, and if they could, they'd drag you into a glass tank and chain you up because they don't want that kind of beauty around them, outshining them. Feeling and living in the depths of life (caring so much it hurts, feeling so much it becomes painful) is a mystical, beautiful thing but it cannot be copied and it shouldn't be copied. Everyone has their place and you are going to drown if you can't breathe underwater.

At the moment the only topic she could discuss was herself. And everyone, she felt, had heard enough about her. They believed it was time that she stop brooding and think of other things. But there were no other things. There was only what had happened. It was as though she lived underwater and had given up on the struggle to swim towards air. It would be too much. Being released into the world of others seemed impossible; it was something she did not even want. How could she explain this to anyone who sought to know how she was or asked if she was getting over what happened?

Poem for My Father You closed the door. I was on the other side, screaming. It was black in your mind. Blacker than burned-out fire. Blacker than poison. Outside everything looked the same. You looked the same. You walked in your body like a living man. But you were not. would you not speak to me for weeks would you hang your coat in the closet without saying hello would you find a shoe out of place and beat me would you come home late would i lose the key would you find my glasses in the garbage would you put me on your knee would you read the bible to me in your smoking jacket after your mother died would you come home drunk and snore would you beat me on the legs would you carry me up the stairs by my hair so that my feet never touch the bottom would you make everything worse to make everything better i believe in god, the father almighty, the maker of heaven, the maker of my heaven and my hell. would you beat my mother would you beat her till she cries like a rabbit would you beat her in a corner of the kitchen while i am in the bathroom trying to bury my head underwater would you carry her to the bed would you put cotton and alcohol on her swollen head would you make love to her hair would you caress her hair would you rub her breasts with ben gay until she stinks would you sleep in the other room in the bed next to me while she sleeps on the pull-out cot would you come on the sheet while i am sleeping. later i look for the spot would you go to embalming school with the last of my mother's money would i see your picture in the book with all the other black boys you were the handsomest would you make the dead look beautiful would the men at the elks club would the rich ladies at funerals would the ugly drunk winos on the street know ben pretty ben regular ben would your father leave you when you were three with a mother who threw butcher knives at you would he leave you with her screaming red hair would he leave you to be smothered by a pillow she put over your head would he send for you during the summer like a rich uncle would you come in pretty corduroys until you were nine and never heard from him again would you hate him would you hate him every time you dragged hundred pound cartons of soap down the stairs into white ladies' basements would you hate him for fucking the woman who gave birth to you hate him flying by her house in the red truck so that other father threw down his hat in the street and stomped on it angry like we never saw him (bye bye to the will of grandpa bye bye to the family fortune bye bye when he stompled that hat, to the gold watch, embalmer's palace, grandbaby's college) mother crying silently, making floating island sending it up to the old man's ulcer would grandmother's diamonds close their heartsparks in the corner of the closet yellow like the eyes of cockroaches? Old man whose sperm swims in my veins, come back in love, come back in pain.

Goggles but no bathing suit?" she asked. Daniel blushed. "I guess that was stupid. But I was in a hurry, only thinking about what you would need to get the halo." He drove the paddle back into the water, propelling them more quickly than a speedboat. "You can swim in your underwear, right?" Now Luce blushed. Under normal circumstances, the question might have seemed thrilling, something they both would have giggled at. Not these nine days. She nodded. Eight days now. Daniel was deadly serious. Luce just swallowed hard and said, "Of course." The pair of green-gray spires grew larger, more detailed, and then they were upon them. They were tall and conical, made of rusted slats of copper. They had once been capped by small teardrop-shaped copper flags sculpted to look like they were rippling in the wind, but one weathered flag was pocked with holes, and the other had broken off completely. In the open water, the spires' protrusion was bizarre, suggesting a cavernous cathedral of the deep. Luce wondered how long ago the church had sunk, how deep it sat below. The thought of diving down there in ridiculous goggles and mom-bought underwear made her shudder. "This church must be huge," she said. She meant I don't think I can do this. I can't breathe underwater. How are we going to find one small halo sunk in the middle of the sea? "I can take you down as far as the chapel itself, but only that far. So long as you hold on to my hand." Daniel extended a warm hand to help Luce stand up in the gondola. "Breathing will not be a problem. But the church will still be sanctified, which means I'll need you to find the halo and bring it out to me." Daniel yanked his T-shirt off over his head, dropping it to the bench of the gondola. He stepped out of his pants quickly, perfectly balanced on the boat, then kicked off his tennis shoes. Luce watched, feeling something stir inside her, until she realized she was supposed to be stripping down, too. She kicked off her boots, tugged off her socks, stepped out of her jeans as modestly as she could. Daniel held her hand to help her balance; he was watching her but not the way she would have expected. He was worried about her, the goose bumps rising on her skin. He rubbed her arms when she slipped off he sweater and stood freezing in her sensible underwear n the gondola in the middle of the Venetian lagoon. Again she shivered, cold and fear an indecipherable mass inside her. But her voice sounded brave when she tugged the goggles, which pinched, down over her eyes and said, "Okay, let's swim." They held hands, just like they had the last time they'd swum together at Sword & Cross. As their feet lifted off the varnished floor of the gondola, Daniel's hand tugged her upward, higher than she ever could have jumped herself-and then they dove. Her body broke the surface of the sea, which wasn't as cold as she'd expected. In fact, the closer she swam beside Daniel, the warmer the wake around them grew. He was glowing.

There was a young man who, you know, He wanted to make a lot of money And so he went to this Guru, right. And he told the Guru, “You know I wanna be on the same level you’re on.” And so The Guru said, “If you wanna be on the same level I’m on, I’ll meet tomorrow, At the beach, at 4 AM.” He’s like, “The beach? I said I wanna make money. I don’t wanna swim.” Guru said, “If you wanna make money, I’ll meet you tomorrow. 4 AM.” So the young man got there 4 AM. He all ready to rock n’ roll. Got on a suit. Should have worn shorts. The old man grabs his hand and said, “How bad do you wanna be successful?” He said, “Real bad”. [The Guru] He said, “Walk on out in the water.” So he walks out into the water. Watch this. When he walks out into the water it goes waist deep. So he’s like, “This guy crazy. I wanna make money and he got me out here swimming. I didn’t ask to be a lifeguard. I wanna make money.” So he [The Guru] said, “Come out a little further.” [He] walked out a little further. Then he had it right around this area, The shoulder area. “So this old man crazy. He making money, But he crazy.” So he [The Guru] said, “Come on out a little further.” He came out a little further, It was right at his mouth, My man like, “I’m not about to go back in. This guy out of his mind.” So the old man said, “I thought you said you wanted to be successful?” He said, “I do.” He [The Guru] said, “Walk a little further.” He came, Dropped his head in, Held him down, Hold him down, My man getting scratchy, Holding him down, He [The Guru] had him held down, Just before my man was about to pass out, He [The Guru] raised him up. He [The Guru] said, “I got a question for you.” He [The Guru] said, “When you were underwater, what did you want to do?” He said, “I wanted to breathe.” He [The Guru] told the guy; He [The Guru] said, “When you want to succeed, As bad as you want to breathe, Then you’ll be successful.

In 1994, Karl Sims was doing experiments on simulated organisms, allowing them to evolve their own body designs and swimming strategies to see if they would converge on some of the same underwater locomotion strategies that real-life organisms use.5, 6, 7 His physics simulator—the world these simulated swimmers inhabited—used Euler integration, a common way to approximate the physics of motion. The problem with this method is that if motion happens too quickly, integration errors will start to accumulate. Some of the evolved creatures learned to exploit these errors to obtain free energy, quickly twitching small body parts and letting the math errors send them zooming through the water.

Kids didn’t just disappear unless someone made them disappear.‘Relax, mate,’ the head of security said. ‘We’ve never lost one yet.’ Lots of kids wandered off at the Easter Show, he told them. They were always found, usually somewhere near the food.Doug had tried to relax, to stay calm, but he could feel the panic building inside him.The place was too big.There were too many people.Lockie could be anywhere. The police were called. It took hours for everyone to leave the showgrounds because every family was stopped. Every parent was questioned and every child identified. It was way past midnight when everyone had finally gone home, and still they had not found Lockie.The head of security changed his tone. The police held whispered conversations in groups. They began to look at him with sympathy in their eyes.Doug felt his heart slow down. There was a ringing in his ears. He was underwater and he couldn’t swim.Lockie was gone.They had lost one.Sammy had gone from impatience to hunger to exhaustion. She didn’t understand what was happening.Sarah sat next to the pram twisting her hands. She did not cry. She didn’t cry for days, but every time Doug went near her he could hear her muttering the word ‘please’. ‘Please, please, please, please.’ It drove Doug mad and he had to move away because he wanted to hit her, to snap her out of her trance. He had never lifted a hand to his wife or his children, but now he had to close his fist and dig his nails into his palm to keep himself from lashing out Sarah didn’t believe in hitting children; she believed in time out and consequences. It was different to the way Doug had been raised but he had come around to the idea. The thought of anyone—especially himself—hurting Sarah and the kids was almost too much to bear.Doug sometimes wondered, after, if whoever had taken his son had hit him. When he did think about someone hurting his boy he could feel his hands curl into fists. He would embrace the rush of heat that came with the anger because at least it was a different feeling to the sorrow and despair. Anger felt constructive. He wanted to kill everyone, even himself. But as fast as the anger came it would recede and he would be back at the place he hated to be. Mired in his own helplessness. There was fuck-all he could do.

Because a lake is conceived as having only two primary dimensions, you can't swim inside the lake, though that would seem to make geometric sense. Lederer asks why we say that something can be underwater or underground even though it's surrounded by, not beneath, the water or the ground. It's because water and ground are conceived as 2-D surfaces, not 3-D volumes, geologically improbable though that is. The dimensionality of an object is also the aspect of its geometry that modifiers "see" when they combine with it in a phrase. A big CD, for example, has to have an above-average diameter, not an above-standard thickness (that could only be a thick CD), and a big lake has to be one with an unusually large area, regardless of its depth; it can't be a few yards wide and a mile deep.

The sky takes each flurry and sends it right back with just a hint of music lingering in the echo, a belt from some invisible trombone, the lowest note on an organ drawn out. Sound after sound flooding from my body like war-zone fire on a cold day, Mama rubbing the tightness out of my jaw, melting the tears back into my skin, until there is no more noise and my chest is heaving, out of breath and raw and Mama is holding me and the cars have not stopped, have not slowed, all of it, all the time racing past us while we are stuck between the sky and asphalt that does not know our names and Mama will walk me to the bus stop and leave me there and we will not speak of what the freeway does to us when it is nighttime and we are ghosts. But Mama taught me how to swim and I can see underwater. I can see.

I knew from experience that before you went swimming off a dock for the first time each summer, you needed to check the sides and the ladder carefully for bryozoan, colonies of slimy green critters that grew on hard surfaces underwater (think coral, but gelatinous-shudder). They wouldn’t hurt you, they were part of a healthy freshwater ecosystem, their presence meant the water was pristine and unpolluted, blah blah blah-but none of this was any consolation if you accidentally touched them. Poking around with a water ski and finding nothing, I spent the rest of the afternoon watching for Sean from the water. And getting out occasionally when he sped by in the boat, in order to woo him like Halle Berry coming out of the ocean in a James Bond movie (which I had seen with the boys about a hundred times. Bikini scene, seven hundred times). Only I seemed to have misplaced my dagger.

It is often said that the separation of the present reality from transcendence, so commonplace today, is pernicious in that it undermines the universe of fixed values. Because life on Earth is the only thing that exists, because it is only in this life that we can seek fulfillment, the only kind of happiness that can be offered to us is purely carnal. Heavens have not revealed anything to us; there are no signs that would indicate the need to devote ourselves to some higher, nonmaterial goals. We furnish our lives ever more comfortably; we build ever more beautiful buildings; we invent ever more ephemeral trends, dances, one-season stars; we enjoy ourselves. Entertainment derived from a nineteenth-century funfair is today becoming an industry underpinned by an ever more perfect technology. We are celebrating a cult of machines—which are replacing us at work, in the kitchen, in the field—as if we were pursuing the idealized ambience of the royal court (with its bustling yet idle courtiers) and wished to extend it across the whole world. In fifty years, or at most a hundred, four to five billion people will become such courtiers. At the same time, a feeling of emptiness, superficiality, and sham sets in, one that is particularly dominant in civilizations that have left the majority of primitive troubles, such as hunger and poverty, behind them. Surrounded by underwater-lit swimming pools and chrome and plastic surfaces, we are suddenly struck by the thought that the last remaining beggar, having accepted his fate willingly, thus turning it into an ascetic act, was incomparably richer than man is today, with his mind fed TV nonsense and his stomach feasting on delicatessen from exotic lands. The beggar believed in eternal happiness, the arrival of which he awaited during his short-term dwelling in this vale of tears, looking as he did into the vast transcendence ahead of him. Free time is now becoming a space that needs to be filled in, but it is actually a vacuum, because dreams can be divided into those that can be realized immediately—which is when they stop being dreams—and those that cannot be realized by any means. Our own body, with its youth, is the last remaining god on the ever-emptying altars; no one else needs to be obeyed and served. Unless something changes, our numerous Western intellectuals say, man is going to drown in the hedonism of consumption. If only it was accompanied by some deep pleasure! Yet there is none: submerged into this slavish comfort, man is more and more bored and empty. Through inertia, the obsession with the accumulation of money and shiny objects is still with us, yet even those wonders of civilization turn out to be of no use. Nothing shows him what to do, what to aim for, what to dream about, what hope to have. What is man left with then? The fear of old age and illness and the pills that restore mental balance—which he is losing, inbeing irrevocably separated from transcendence.

The first buddy pair enters the deep end of the pool and begins buddy breathing. The games begin when, like a hungry shark, an instructor menacingly stalks the two trainees. Suddenly, the instructor darts forward, grabs the snorkel, and tosses it about ten feet away where it slowly sinks to the bottom. It is the duty of the last person to have taken a breath, to retrieve the snorkel. As the swimmer dives ten feet deep to recover the snorkel, his buddy floats motionless, his face underwater, holding his breath, patiently conserving oxygen. The swimmer returns with the snorkel and hands it to his buddy, but before his teammate can grab it and breathe, the instructor sadistically snatches the snorkel and again tosses it away. The swimmer, still holding his breath, dives to get the snorkel, but the instructor grabs his facemask and floods it with pool water. The swimmer has a choice. He can clear his mask of water, by blowing valuable air into it through his nose, or he can continue to swim with his mask full of water blurring his vision. The swimmer makes the right decision and retrieves the snorkel. All this time both trainees are holding their breath, battling the urge to surface and suck in a lung full of sweet fresh air. With lungs burning and vision dimming, the swimmer hands the snorkel to his buddy. After taking only two breaths, his buddy returns the snorkel and, finally the instructor allows the swimmer to breathe his two breaths. While the trainees try to breathe, instructors splash water into foam around them while screaming insults. Despite the distractions, the snorkel travels back and forth between the trainees until once again, an instructor snatches it, tosses it across the pool, and floods both students’ masks. This harassment continues until the instructor is satisfied with the trainees’ performance.

The ocean made space for me, pressing against the blackness of my assumed skin, buoying me and counter-acting the heaviness of the lead fastened around my waist. I kicked and continued my initial dive, feeling the pressures sliding back against my belly and legs, the quiet acceptance of the seas. Space and oceans have much in common, both are alien to us, not our element, both contain mysteries, dangers, sudden beauties of their own and beyond our land-bound experience. But space is a container of nothingness, a vacuum, a void of immeasurable loneliness and occasional transcendence. Water is a repository of life, and the life asserts itself as you move through the ocean; creatures large and small, beautiful or stunningle grotesque according to their custom, aquatic forests and microscopic landscapes, beings caught between the layers of life, rocks made of living creatures and living creatures made of stone, vegetable animals and animated plants and sudden deep, heart-breaking, lovely jewels that flick their trailing rainbows and dart away from you between the fronds of weeds, leaving shimmering mysteries that can be pursued, but never truly caught and comprehended. Space does not care whether you are there or not, and the struggle to survive between worlds is a fight to avoid being sucked into a vacuum, into an ultimate nil. Implacable in its indifference, it kills you simply because it is, and crushes you with the weight of your knowledge of its indifference. But the ocean is not indifferent. It reacts and shapes itself to your presence or absence, presents its laws as implacable realities, but an instant later displays the very non-exemplar of that rule swimming calmly through the depths. Accept the strangeness and the ocean opens to you, gives you freedom and beauty, a hook into otherness. But wonder approached in fear is cancelled, disappears into threathening shiverings of distant plants, into terrifying movements of bulky darkness through the rocks.

Sam Underwater, everything is quiet. Tranquil. Like heaven is all around you, caressing your body, pulling you into its embrace. Deeper and deeper, it pulls at your legs until they beg to be released. I hold my water-resistant camera in front of me and take multiple pictures of the cold depths of the ocean. Its beauty never fails to mesmerize me. But I can’t stay for too long; sooner or later, that urge to breathe always pulls me back to the surface toward the dark sky littered with a million flickering lights … back into the noise of swooshing water and rushing wind. The shore is mostly deserted, except for a few beer cans, party cups, and some clothes and trash lying scattered all around. The only other person there is Nate Wilson … the most handsome guy at school and so much more than that. He’s sitting on a few rocks near the edge of the beach with a girl by his side. I can’t stop watching. Their hands touch briefly, but then the wave overtakes me and blocks my view. When the water lowers, I shake my head, but the waves keep picking up. Still, I hold up my camera and take a few pictures. Right as he turns his head toward me, I dive underwater again. Here, there are no boys, no girls, and no secret touches. Just me and the water, and all the beautiful creatures below that need to meet my camera. A single picture says more than words ever will. No matter how powerful they are. Nate People say it only takes a few minutes for your life to be destroyed. I never believed them … until today. With just the snap of a finger, a stupid decision and a simple push, I marked my own fate. My body grows colder and colder the longer I stay in the water. It consumes me whole as I stray farther and farther away from myself. From reality. I’m so damn dizzy, but I can’t collapse here. Not now, not in the middle of the ocean. I take a deep breath and peel my eyes open, forcing myself to go. That’s when I spot her … the girl and her camera. FLASH. I cover my eyes with my hand. Salty seawater enters my nostrils and mouth as I struggle to swim. When I open my eyes again, the girl is gone; swallowed by the same waves that drag me back to the shore. As my feet sink into the sand and the water creeps up against my toes, I stop and turn around, clutching the long red hairs in my hand as though they’re my last lifeline. This is now the place where not only my life changed forever. But hers too.

Washington University found that adding a single extra gene dramatically boosted a mouse’s memory and ability. These “smart mice” could navigate mazes faster, remember events better, and outperform other mice in a wide variety of tests. They were dubbed “Doogie mice,” after the precocious character on the TV show Doogie Howser, M.D. Dr. Tsien began by analyzing the gene NR2B, which acts like a switch controlling the brain’s ability to associate one event with another. (Scientists know this because when the gene is silenced or rendered inactive, mice lose this ability.) All learning depends on NR2B, because it controls the communication between memory cells of the hippocampus. First Dr. Tsien created a strain of mice that lacked NR2B, and they showed impaired memory and learning disabilities. Then he created a strain of mice that had more copies of NR2B than normal, and found that the new mice had superior mental capabilities. Placed in a shallow pan of water and forced to swim, normal mice would swim randomly about. They had forgotten from just a few days before that there was a hidden underwater platform. The smart mice, however, went straight to the hidden platform on the first try. Since then, researchers have been able to confirm these results in other labs and create even smarter strains of mice. In 2009, Dr. Tsien published a paper announcing yet another strain of smart mice, dubbed “Hobbie-J” (named after a character in Chinese cartoons). Hobbie-J was able to remember novel facts (such as the location of toys) three times longer than the genetically modified strain of mouse previously thought to be the smartest. “This adds to the notion that NR2B is a universal switch for memory formation,” remarked Dr. Tsien. “It’s like taking Michael Jordon and making him a super Michael Jordan,” said graduate student Deheng Wang. There are limits, however, even to this new mice strain. When these mice were given a choice to take a left or right turn to get a chocolate reward, Hobbie-J was able to remember the correct path for much longer than the normal mice, but after five minutes he, too, forgot. “We can never turn it into a mathematician. They are rats, after all,” says Dr. Tsien. It should also be pointed out that some of the strains of smart mice were exceptionally timid compared to normal mice. Some suspect that, if your memory becomes too great, you also remember all the failures and hurts as well, perhaps making you hesitant. So there is also a potential downside to remembering too much.

Then, decades later, in the 1970s, a hard-assed U.S. swim coach named James Counsilman rediscovered it. Counsilman was notorious for his “hurt, pain, and agony”–based training techniques, and hypoventilation fit right in. Competitive swimmers usually take two or three strokes before they flip their heads to the side and inhale. Counsilman trained his team to hold their breath for as many as nine strokes. He believed that, over time, the swimmers would utilize oxygen more efficiently and swim faster. In a sense, it was Buteyko’s Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing and Zátopek hypoventilation—underwater. Counsilman used it to train the U.S. Men’s Swimming team for the Montreal Olympics. They won 13 gold medals, 14 silver, and 7 bronze, and they set world records in 11 events. It was the greatest performance by a U.S. Olympic swim team in history. Hypoventilation training fell back into obscurity after several studies in the 1980s and 1990s argued that it had little to no impact on performance and endurance. Whatever these athletes were gaining, the researchers reported, must have been based on a strong placebo effect. In the early 2000s, Dr. Xavier Woorons, a French physiologist at Paris 13 University, found a flaw in these studies. The scientists critical of the technique had measured it all wrong. They’d been looking at athletes holding their breath with full lungs, and all that extra air in the lungs made it difficult for the athletes to enter into a deep state of hypoventilation. Woorons repeated the tests, but this time subjects practiced the half-full technique, which is how Buteyko trained his patients, and likely how Counsilman trained his swimmers. Breathing less offered huge benefits. If athletes kept at it for several weeks, their muscles adapted to tolerate more lactate accumulation, which allowed their bodies to pull more energy during states of heavy anaerobic stress, and, as a result, train harder and longer. Other reports showed hypoventilation training provided a boost in red blood cells, allowing athletes to carry more oxygen and produce more energy with each breath. Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere. Over the years, this style of breath restriction has been given many names—hypoventilation, hypoxic training, Buteyko technique, and the pointlessly technical “normobaric hypoxia training.” The outcomes were the same: a profound boost in performance.* Not just for elite athletes, but for everyone. Just a few weeks of the training significantly increased endurance, reduced more “trunk fat,” improved cardiovascular function, and boosted muscle mass compared to normal-breathing exercise. This list goes on. The takeaway is that hypoventilation works. It helps train the body to do more with less. But that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant.

One minute his eleven-year-old body was asleep in bed, and suddenly he was falling through the sky. The next thing he knew, he was underwater, and now he was surfacing and splashing about. He had landed in a swimming pool.

Unlike the seeds, I’d thrown the bucket much farther out. I tried swimming underwater, looking in its general direction and seeing nothing but inky midnight. I splashed to the surface, inhaled deeply then crash-dived like a submarine. There it was! In the purple haze of subsurface sunlight, I could just make out a small object hovering on a narrow ledge of gravel. Just one block over, and it would have been lost forever.

The next morning, Steve took his boat out and saw what had happened. The big male had triggered the trap and was snared in the mesh--sort of. Even though the rectangular-shaped net was the biggest he had, the croc’s tail and back leg stuck out. But the black ghost had finally been caught. At Steve’s approach, the animal thrashed wildly, smashing apart mangrove trees on either side of the trap. Steve tried to top-jaw-rope the croc, but it was fighting too violently. Normally Chilli acted as a distraction, giving Steve the chance to secure the croc. But the dog wanted no part of this. She cowered on the floor of the dinghy, unwilling to face this monstrously large croc. Steve was truly on his own. He finally secured a top-jaw rope and tied the other end to a tree. With a massive “death roll”--a defensive maneuver in which the reptile spins its enormous body--the big croc smashed the tree flat and snapped it off. Steve tried again; the croc thrashed, growling and roaring in protest at the trapper in khaki, lunging again and again to tear Steve apart. Finally, the giant croc death-rolled so violently that he came off the bank and landed in the boat, which immediately sank. Chilli had jumped out and was swimming for shore as Steve worked against time. With the croc underwater, Steve lashed the croc, trap and all, in the dinghy. But moving the waterlogged boat and a ton of crocodile was simply too much. Steve sprinted several miles in the tropical heat to reach a cane farm, where he hoped to get help. The cane farmers were a bit hesitant to lend a hand, so Steve promised them a case of beer, and a deal was made. With a sturdy fishing boat secured to each side of Steve’s dinghy, they managed to tow it downriver where they could winch croc and boat onto dry land to get him into a crate. By this time, a crowd of spectators had gathered. When Steve told me the story of the capture, I got the sense that he felt sorry he had to catch the crocodile at all. “It seemed wrong to remove the king of the river,” Steve said. “That croc had lasted in his territory for decades. Here I was taking him out of it. The local people just seemed relieved, and a couple even joked about how many boots he’d make.” Steve was very clever to include the local people and soon won them over to see just how special this crocodile really was. Just as he was dragged into his crate, the old croc attempted a final act of defiance, a death roll that forced Steve to pin him again. “I whispered to him to calm him down,” Steve said. “What did you say to him?” I asked. “Please don’t die.” The black crocodile didn’t die. Steve brought him back to Beerwah, named him Acco, and gave him a beautiful big pond that Bob had prepared, with plenty of places to hide. We were in the Crocodile Environmental Park at the zoo when Steve first told me the story of Acco’s capture. I just had to revisit him after hearing his story. There he was, the black ghost himself, magnificently sunning on the bank of his billabong.

The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You’re in the eighth grade. You know these things.

from school. In Alek’s village, there was no running water or electricity. She had to walk to a well for drinking water, but she and her family lived a simple, happy life. Then a terrible war broke out, and Alek’s life changed forever. As the warning sirens wailed over their village, Alek and her family had to run away from the fighting. It was the rainy season. The river had flooded, the bridges across it were underwater, and Alek could not swim. She was terrified of drowning, but her mom helped her to cross safely to the other side. During their journey, Alek’s mom foraged for food and sold packets of salt until she saved enough to buy passports for her

It wasn’t just the underwater swim that had exhausted me, but the overuse of shadow magic. My muscles buzzed and burned. Shadow magic wasn’t native to my body like it was to Ruadan’s. I could draw it from the lumen stone, but it tended to overwhelm me and wear me out. This must be what drug addicts felt like on a comedown

I gagged. It was not air. It was cold, it smelled like the hiss of gas in a cellar, it had echoes in it, it rang like metal footsteps, it hissed, cell doors clanged shut, I heard my voice calling to me down long stone corridors, I could not breathe. I knew I must not lose consciousness. I fought. I shook my head, I could not free myself. And now great swirls of colored light advanced toward me, spinning like pinwheels, revolving so fast they seemed to scream. And then the light was splintering and flying toward me, needles of it stinging me, flying past me, yellow and red stings, and now a roaring sound filled my head and began to pulsate. And all this swirling light and roaring screaming noise popped into Donald Duck looming up from a point, and he spoke and clacks came out of his mouth, and then Mickey Mouse loomed up in front of me and made horrible faces, and spoke in clacks or roars, and they were laughing at me and shaking their fists and showing their teeth. And I couldn’t help it, now I was breathing in this terrible gas in a white tiled swimming pool or corridor whose walls moved in toward me and then outwards. I was falling through my Compton’s Picture Encyclopedia article on the sea and these underwater animals were laughing in my ears, but the laughter pulsated like a machine, and I couldn’t stop breathing even though I knew it was the machine breathing. The smell was cold, the hiss grew softer. I felt as if I were under the sea but breathing under the sea somehow this air that was the only thing left to breathe in all this cold floating.

She’d believed I would go far, regardless my drawbacks galore and unsavory habits. I found a good rock and watched the sun melt into the Cumberlands. Layers of orange like a buttermilk pie cooling on the horizon. Clouds scooting past, throwing spots of light and dark over the mountainheads. The light looked drinkable. It poured on a mountain so I saw the curve of every treetop edged in gold, like the scales of a fish. Then poured off, easing them back into shadow. I got all caught up in the show, waking up from my long cold swim underwater. Breaking the surface is a shock, the white is so white, the blue so blue. The air that’s your breath.

Rahab could swim the waters above and below the firmament. It was all her territory. But her special domain was the Abyss. From there, she could access every body of water that ultimately connected to this underwater abode. Her birth waters were Lake Urimiya, where Elohim created her and held her at bay when he established the heavens and the earth. She was in the Lake again at that moment. She had returned to this sacred ground to give birth to her own spawn. The Nephilim paddled on the surface of the water. They were unaware of the nemesis below, a protective mother sea dragon and her very hungry newborn offspring, Leviathan. Leviathan was every bit the armored sea serpent as its parent. Even so young, it was already about half the size of Rahab. But it had something its progenitor did not: seven heads. Seven dragon heads on seven snakelike necks with seven times the predator’s snapping jaws, and seven times the rows of razor teeth. Leviathan’s strike zone was wide and it was more agile and speedier than Rahab. And it had seven times the fury. The Nephilim were oblivious to the shadowy forms approaching them from the darkness below. They filled the waters with their crafts The lead skiffs were only two thirds of the way across. The first casualties came at the front of the line. A huge explosion of water erupted. Pontoons snapped in two, throwing Nephilim into the water. Yahipan screamed, “RAHAB!!” The Nephilim stopped rowing and looked about the water. The huge serpentine armor broke the surface again, crushing a slew of the flatboats and dragging Nephilim into the depths. The spiny back cut through the water and disappeared. The Rephaim yelled orders. The Nephilim rowed for their lives. But it was an easy feast for the monsters of the deep. Rahab simply opened her mouth and scooped up dozens of Nephilim like so many minnows. Leviathan came next, with the seven dragon heads snapping up Nephilim faster than they could get out of the way. Leviathan might be a newborn and smaller than its mother, but already armor covered it. It was even able to launch small pillars of fire from its nostrils. Its youth and speed made up for its size as it darted and dodged around, all of its heads coordinated in a bloodbath of feeding. Inanna wondered where all that food went. Some Nephilim tried to fight back But it was futile and the smart ones made for the shoreline. They hoped they might get lucky and be overlooked by their serpentine predators. That was only the beginning. The sorry paddlers were no match for the worst of all Elohim’s creatures. Another creature came up from the depths. Its body could not be seen, only tentacles bursting from the water and crushing demigods in its grip. Yahipan and Thamaq were in the middle of the mayhem and counted eight of these snakelike appendages grabbing hapless soldiers.

Is this the first time you see her swim?” Shla’s mum asked me quietly. She was sitting right next to me, it was impossible for her to miss my tears. “Yes.” “Ah,” she said, she kept watching the pool for a few beats. “Do you need to go?” “What?” I said, confused besides upset. She turned to me, her blue eyes hard as flint. “Do you need to go?” I was trembling slightly, but I was angry, too. What right did she have to tell me not to be upset when the person I loved had lost so much? “No.” “Then you need to look back,” she said, and turned away from me. I followed her gaze to the pool and felt my heart stutter when I caught Shla pushing off the opposite wall once again. I had missed her going up to the poolside on her clutches because her mum had been practically gushing about the race and her daughter’s recovery and how she was going to win despite all odds -- everybody else in the pool was able-bodied. I could see her right leg for a moment, but it wasn’t like the other leg couldn’t have been underwater or something. I forced myself not to look away this time: She was incredibly beautiful, and after a few strokes, as captivating as any animal in its element, body blending with the water that surrounded her like it didn’t recognize it as a separate substance. And then she reached our side and turned, upside down for a few endless seconds to switch directions. Her left leg ended below the round bone of her knee like someone had photoshopped reality to erase the rest of it. I blinked and she was back in the water, more competent in it than I had ever felt on solid ground with full use of all my limbs.

waters, and even some that leave the water altogether. The Japanese flying squid (Todarodes pacificus) can take to the air like a flying fish; it builds up speed underwater and then launches itself out of the water and glides until reentry. Flying squid have been observed to cover distances as long as 100 feet above the surface, presumably to avoid predators, or utilizing jet-propelled aerial locomotion to save energy as they migrate. It has been shown that penguins, sea lions, and dolphins save energy by performing low-level leaps over the surface as they swim, which enables them to momentarily avoid the resistance of water and, concurrently, grab a breath of air. Squid don’t need a breath of air—they breathe water through their gills, like fishes—but several squid species can and do leave the water; mariners in all oceans occasionally find little squid on the decks after a night of sailing. The Humboldt squid (Dosidicus) has also been observed to get itself airborne; if a hundred-pound, ink-squirting, beak-snapping squid lands on your deck, you might have a bit of a problem.

Man was made to swim. Swimming is a natural sport, performed in harmony with nature.

She had been shot once, point-blank in the chest, from five, maybe six feet away. 

Cecelia turned her gaze away from the girls and looked at the shimmer blue of their kidney shaped swimming pool, with its powerful underwater light, the perfect symbol of suburban bliss, except for that strange intermit sound like a baby choking that was coming from the pool filter.

Cecilia turned her gaze away from the girls and looked at the shimmering blue of their kidney-shaped swimming pool with its powerful underwater light: the perfect symbol of suburban bliss. Except for that strange intermittent sound, like a baby choking, that was coming from the pool filter. She could hear it right now. Cecilia had asked John-Paul to look at it weeks before he went to Chicago; he hadn’t got around to it, but he would have been furious if she’d arranged for some repair guy to come and fix it. It would have indicated lack of faith in his abilities. Of course, when he did finally look at it, he wouldn’t be able to fix it and she’d have to get the guy in anyway. It was frustrating. Why hadn’t that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn’t feel like a nag.

welcomed the opportunity to become the first astronaut trained underwater in a swimming pool to simulate the effects of neutral buoyancy, trying to maneuver in a weightless environment in space. Some of my colleagues thought I was being eccentric, but the sensations in the pool prepared me for what it might feel like drifting along at 17,500 miles an hour, tethered to a spacecraft.

A pianist can sometimes resemble a slow underwater swimmer, and a lover likewise swims within the sea of the other, far down where no waves can reach; overhead, the piano’s lid, heavier than a coffin’s, shuts out extraneous vibrations, while simultaneously demarcating the boundary between water and air. It’s too perfect underwater; that’s what kills us, the perfection!

She followed them underwater until she could no longer breathe and swam back for air. Until she could no longer see anything in those depths. Until she no longer had strength to keep diving down. And she tried. Swimming, screaming, fighting. She tried her very best. To drown herself along with them. To feel what they felt. As she had been trying to all her life.

When I heard the ear-piercing scream tonight, I figured someone in the Fourth was having a nightmare of the impending-danger variety. Then I realized the shrieks weren’t coming from the barracks but from inside the bathhouse. For our safety, nobody is supposed to be in the baths after eleven, because there are no lifeguards on duty. Janice says the real reason the doors are locked is to thwart romantically inclined legionnaires from getting up to shenanigans in there. That thwarting can be thwarted, though, if you know about the secret entrance to the main pool. Which everybody does, although not many people use it, because you have to swim underwater through a narrow concrete pipe, then squeeze through a small mesh gate that leads into the pool. You’d better hope you’re an underwater-breathing descendent of Neptune if you get stuck in there. Apparently, a girl and a boy from the First Cohort thought the risk was worth it, because they sneaked in via the not-so-secret entrance tonight. I’m thinking their lovey-dovey mood evaporated when they surfaced, though. Because dead rats. Hundreds of them. Floating in the pool. Blocking the hot-springs water supply. Clogging the drains. Even hanging from the basket for used towels. I can’t imagine anything more totally, completely, scream-inducingly disgusting. And mysterious, too, because no one can explain how so many rats got in there so quickly. The filtration system is shut off when the baths close, so they weren’t pumped in with the water. And the lifeguard swears the place was clean when he locked up at eleven. The couple sneaked in around eleven fifteen. Could someone have broken in and distributed all those rats in just fifteen minutes? Didn’t seem likely.

Emma counts down to three, and as soon as we splash into the water, it comes alive. Millions of white lights sparkle. They radiate out like a shockwave, tiny brilliant explosions like nothing I've ever seen. Emma is stomping onward, a path of light in her wake. I follow along, but I go slower, not wanting to take the next step until the last one has subsided, afraid that the magic will run out. It's like lightning underwater, like microscopic fireflies raging in sync. When the water calms back to darkness, I lean over, run my hand through the water. The lights follow suit, like it's my skin that's charged and not the water. I hear Emma's stomping and near-maniacal laughter get closer. "What is this?" I ask, my face only a few inches away from the water. I hadn't even noticed how warm the lake is, how soaked through my jeans are. I swirl my fingers across the surface, enchanted. "This is nature being ridiculous," Emma says. "Bioluminescent plankton. Like swimming in fireworks.

Sunday, Even more later… After swimming for a while, we finally made it to a huge underwater rock. “This is it,” Garth said. “The Lost Ocean Temple gate is right here.” “What gives?” Steve asked. “It just looks like a giant rock.” Then suddenly, the clouds parted, and the moon rays lit up the water. Suddenly the giant rock changed right before our eyes. Next thing we know a giant gate appeared made out of pearls and diamonds.

swimming those kinds of distances was never about staring at a black line on the bottom of the pool. It’s about shutting everything else out and existing in your own head, your own thoughts, until the world is ready to have you again.

trained one of my favorites—Keiki, an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin—to place swimming pool floats in his “piggy bank,” a bicycle basket suspended just underwater. I also trained him to bring floats to me. I would give him one fish for a white float, five for a red float, and 10 for a blue float. He quickly figured that out and brought me his blue floats first. He earned floats during the show, and he would store them in his piggy bank until he could trade them for fish. We did four shows a day, and I learned how to read an audience and improvise to keep them entertained.

An ideal notebook should be waterproof, like the books children read in the bath. You can’t have a notebook getting wet as you wash, like Ulises Lima’s books do when he reads in the shower. An ideal notebook should be able to go underwater. Whether it floats like a rubber duck or swims in the deep like a whale, it needs to be waterproof.

After more than thirty years of traveling to Oahu, I no longer gasp when I see the wafting palm trees out the plane window or feel quite as awed by the sight of Diamond Head, the volcanic mountain that sits like a massive green bulwark southeast of Waikiki. What I feel now is the exhilaration of familiarity. I am oriented to this place in ways I’d never have imagined for myself as a kid. Though I remain just a visitor, I do know this one island very well, just as I know this one man who introduced me to it, through our regular and committed returns. I feel like I know every bend in the highway that leads from the airport to the North Shore. I know where to go for excellent shave ice and Korean barbecue. I can recognize the scent of plumeria in the air and take delight in the underwater shadow of a manta ray flapping its way through shallow water. I’m well-acquainted with the quiet waters of Hanauma Bay, where we first showed our toddlers how to swim, and the windy sea cliffs at Lanai Lookout, where my husband goes to remember his beloved mother and grandmother, whose ashes he scattered there. A couple of years ago, to celebrate our wedding anniversary, Barack and I made a special trip to Honolulu, and he surprised me with a celebratory dinner out on the town. He’d rented a private space on the rooftop terrace of a hotel by the ocean and hired a small band to play.

My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

Yet it had not always been like this, the ancient whale remembered. Once, he had a golden master who had wooed him with flute song. Then his master had used a conch shell to bray his commands to the whale over long distances. As their communication grew so did their understanding and love of each other. Although the young whale had then been almost twelve metres long, his golden master had begun to swim with him in the sea. Then, one day, his master impetuously mounted him and became the whale rider. In ecstasy the young male had sped out to deep water and, not hearing the cries of fear from his master, had suddenly sounded in a steep accelerated dive, his tail stroking the sky. In that first sounding he had almost killed the one other creature he loved. Reminiscing like this the ancient bull whale began to cry his grief in sound ribbons of overwhelming sorrow. Nothing that the elderly females could do would stop his sadness. When the younger males reported a man-sighting on the horizon it took all their strength of reasoning to prevent their leader from arrowing out towards the source of danger. Indeed, only after great coaxing were they able to persuade him to lead them to the underwater sanctuary. Even so, they knew with a sense of inevitability that the old one had already begun to sound to the source of his sadness and into the disturbing dreams of his youth.

There's a saying: those who do not swim deep in the waters from which they came cannot arrive in the oceans they hope to go. My parents began an ocean away and arrived in a land of lakes and snow. I've been back to their waters (is it mine, too?) but, wasn't a good swimmer. Everyone spoke underwater; I could only hold my breath to listen for so long. I did learn the water carries its own song.

She could not drown the pain; it knew how to breath underwater. So she’d learned to swim.

I’m using the lion and the shark as an example because I think that it illustrates one way to look at Ethereum and bitcoin, when comparing them. If Ethereum is a shark, it is the apex predator within its own environment. It’s a fast swimmer, it can breathe underwater, it eats anything that bothers it. ​ ​If bitcoin is a lion, it rules the land but it doesn’t swim very well.​ ​ You can never really put these two apex predators in a fighting ring together and say, "Let the best one win!" Because the outcome is decided entirely by whether you fill that ring with water or not.

Whales existed before man, but they have been known to us only for two or three generations: until the invention of underwater photography, we hardly knew what they looked like. It was only after we had seen the Earth from orbiting spaceships that the first free-swimming whale was photographed underwater. The first underwater film of sperm whales, off the coast of Sri Lanka, was not taken until 1984; our images of these huge placid creatures moving gracefully and silently through the ocean are more recent than the use of personal computers. We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like.

I’d spent so many months feeling like I was underwater, half in dreamland with those mermaids, hearing all the voices from up above. And since I’d been at Evergreen I felt like I’d been swimming so hard, the water growing warmer and warmer the closer I got to the top. I wasn’t there yet, but now I could see the surface, rippling just beyond my fingers.

One of the crew shouted, “Man overboard!” Seeing what had happened, I instantly threw the engines into reverse, attempting to stop the vessel’s headway without backing over my floundering steward. As the ship shuttered from the unexpected reverse thrust of her engines, now running full speed astern and fighting the current, I watched helplessly as a large prehistoric reptile slithered into the muddy river. Instinctively he was followed by others. Within an instant they were underwater and out of sight, but I knew they were heading in our direction hoping for a tasty dinner. It took a while for me to actually stop the ship’s headway and start to back down. The bosun already had a ladder over the side and yelled to him to stop trashing around, but Henry was panicking and we all expected him to get pulled under. Henry quickly became aware of the imminent danger he was in and stopped floundering, thus allowing the current to carry him in our direction. Now with the ship stopped, we were at the mercy of the current. Henry, with fear painted on his face, would never be closer to us than now. This was the time for him to swim the last short distance, but his fear and knowing that splashing would attract the crocodiles caused him to freeze. With everyone shouting instructions it became confusing, so calculating the risk, I dove in and with just a few powerful strokes was next to Henry. The water was cool compared to the moist air and I thought it felt refreshing, but the only thing I should have been thinking about was getting the two of us out of there! Reaching out, I grabbed his already torn shirt and in what seemed less than a nanosecond towed him back to the ship. A push by me and a pull by the ship’s bosun landed the hapless steward on the deck like a fish out of water. Not wasting any time, I was up the ladder and onto the main deck in a shot. Looking back I half expected to see the huge mouth and glistening white teeth of a fearsome crocodilian. However, nothing stirred as we drifted with the current. Looking back to the now empty river bank I knew that just beneath the surface, they were in the murky water looking for us. Firing the engines up again, I turned the ship away from the bank and back on course in the channel. Handing the helm over to the Quartermaster, I went below to get changed since we would be approaching the treacherous sand bar in about a half hour.

When we dive underwater, the spleen contracts as part of the mammalian diving reflex, shooting its supply of oxygenated red blood cells into circulation around the body. The heart rate slows, and blood vessels constrict, directing blood flow away from the extremities and toward major organs. These energy conservation measures kick in so we can use available oxygen more efficiently.

If you take short breaths, you will tend to have short bursts of attention and to speak in short sentences. Deep, full breaths will enable you to speak in longer, more complex sentences and to form deeper thoughts. Underwater swimming is the best remedy for over-short breath.

A descent into an unlit place from which there is no escape, an underwater labyrinth of impossible mazes. No ghosts floating around down there with writing utensils hidden under their white eyehole sheets. I prefer to either drown like a cockroach in the toilet, or swim the English Channel like a hero. I may well be an eleven-fingered oaf slobbering over a typewriter, pounding out a thorny jumble of trash, an uneducated animal who runs on instinct and feeling. But this is my voice. The facts and figures aren’t important to me, the colors and shapes that make up my world are; they are who I am, right or wrong. The limits of my memory are their own reward. Like Rashomon, the same thing looks different to everyone from their angle. The greatest fault of humankind belongs to those who think their view of what’s real is the only truth. I can only write and hope. Hope to arise from the muddy depths of this process, clear and cleansed, laser beams shooting from my eyeballs, holding the sunken treasure aloft, resplendent in silver and gold, an ebullient grin plastered on my face, and sea monsters docile at my feet.

They say the odds of us being conceived come out to one in four hundred trillion; the fact that we’re alive, healthy and able to work from nine to five is literally a miracle. I once heard a Buddhist metaphor that described the amazing probability of this ‘miracle’: Imagine a lifebuoy thrown into an ocean, and a single turtle living somewhere in all the oceans, swimming around underwater. The chances of my being conceived were the same as the odds of Mr Turtle sticking his head out of the water straight into the middle of that life donut – or the same as the chances of my dad having an orgasm sober.

The next afternoon we got a studio car to take us up to the pool at the inn. We were like kids—Duke was 41, Pete 36, and I was 27. We splashed one another, pushed one another under water, and shoved one another off the diving board. We had a hell of a time, laughing and talking about all the crises during the shooting. In those days, everybody smoked. You were either odd or in training, if you didn’t. But Duke! He lit one Camel off another all day long. We used to raise hell with him about it. “You’re not patting me down already? It’s only ten-thirty in the morning, and you’re already out?” He’d start toward, you patting the pockets on his vest or pants with a big grin on his face, trying to make you think he’d forgotten his. “Hell-ooo, Ol’ Dobe,” he’d say. Then he’d start searching you like a detective looking for dope in one of today’s TV shows. When I’d give him one, he’d say, “Jesus, how can you smoke these (meaning the brand) goddamn things? I’ll give you a pack tomorrow.” He never did so, but I found a remedy for that problem. One day I was passing his dressing room—the kind that is on coasters and is on the sound stage. The door was open, and I looked in. He wasn’t there, but his cigarettes were! Right there on his dressing room table were five cartons of Camels. He’d posed for an ad for them. I just took a carton to my own dressing room, and then, when he wanted a cigarette, I gave him one of his own! He finally said, “Ya’ finally learned to smoke the best cigarette!” The reason I bring all this up is because I thought I was some sort of champ at staying underwater a long time. I figured that because of the way Duke smoked and the fact that his only exercise was playing cards, I could easily beat him swimming underwater. So, as we were splashing around, I said to Duke, “I’ll bet I can swim underwater in this pool longer than you can.” “What? Hah—hah—hah. You have ta’ be kiddin,’ friend! You are on!" I really did think I could beat him; after all, I was younger, and I exercised a lot more than he did. I played golf and tennis, and rode horseback. It was a very big pool. My turn first. I swam up and back twice and then another half. I ran out of air and surfaced. “Not too bad, for a skinny guy,” he commented and jumped in. He then went almost twice as far! I couldn’t believe it! He didn’t razz me or brag—he just knew what he could do. It never occurred to me that his lung capacity was over twice mine and that he’d been diving for abalone off Catalina Island for years.

Enchantment Name Maximum Level Objects Effect Protection IV All armor Reduces physical damage Fire Protection IV All armor Reduces fire damage and burn time, includes damage from lava Blast Protection IV All armor Reduces damage from explosions Feather Falling IV Boots Reduces fall damage Projectile Protection IV All armor Reduces damage from all projectiles Thorns III All armor Damages attackers based on enchantment level Sharpness V Sword/ ax Increases damage of item Smite V Sword/ ax Increases damage to undead mobs Bane of Arthropods V Sword/ ax Increases damage to spiders and silverfish Knockback II Sword Pushes mobs back when hit Fire Aspect II Sword Sets target mob on fire Power V Bow Increases damage done by arrows Punch II Bow Pushes target back Flame I Bow Arrows set mobs on fire Infinity I Bow One arrow can be used infinite times Unbreaking III Most weapons tools and armor Increases durability of tools, armor and weapons Respiration III Helmet Extends underwater breathing time and improves vision Aqua Affinity I Helmet Increases the speed of mining underwater Depth Strider III Boots Increases the horizontal swimming speed inside water Looting II Sword Increases the number of drops as well as the chance of rare mob drops Efficiency V Tools Increases the mining speed. Correct tools must be used with a block to get the boost Silk Touch I Tools Mined blocks drop themselves instead of dropping the usual items. (For instance mining ore block will drop ore block) Fortune III Tools Increases the number of items dropped by a mined block Luck of the Sea III Fishing Rod Reduces the chance of catching junk Lure III Fishing Rod Increases the rate at which fishes bite the hook