Volume 40, Number 5 · March 4, 1993
Taking the Plunge
By Iris Murdoch
Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero
by Charles Sprawson
Pantheon, 307 pp., $22.00
I am not in the athletic sense a keen swimmer, but I am a devoted one. On hot days in the Oxford summer my husband and I usually manage to slip into the Thames a mile or two above Oxford, where the hay in the water meadows is still owned and cut on the medieval strip system. The art is to draw no attention to oneself but to cruise quietly by the reeds like a water rat: seeing and unseen from that angle, one can hear the sedge warblers' mysterious little melodies, and sometimes a cuckoo flies cuckooing over our heads, or a kingfisher flashes past. Very poetical. And how much more so than a swimming pool, which is just a machine for exercising in.
Review, 2892 words
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