“There is a pressure to swim well and to use this water correctly. People think swimming is carefree and effortless. A bath! In fact, it is full of anxieties. Every water has its own rules and offering. Misuse is hard to explain. Perhaps involved is that commonplace struggle to know beauty, to know beauty exactly, to put oneself right in its path, to be in the perfect place to hear the nightingale sing, see the groom kiss the bride, clock the comet. Every water has a right place to be, but that place is in motion. You have to keep finding it, keep having it find you. Your movement sinks into and out of it with each stroke. You can fail it with each stroke. What does that mean, fail it.”
“Water is as different from air as from stones, and you must find your way through its structures, its ancientness, the history of an entity without response to you and yet complicit in your obstinate intrusion.”
“Rationales have to do with composite things—migrants, swimmers, the selfish, the damned, the plural—but existence and sense belong to singularity. You can make sentences about a composite thing, you can’t ask it to look back at you.”
“She stares at the blue-green. It has clearness, wetness, coolness, the deep-lit self-immersedness of water. You made a lake, she says, turning to him, but he is gone, now it is night, off to wherever he goes when he is absolved. She stands awhile, watching the fox swim, looking back on the day, its images too strong, and yet the soul—how does it ever get peace in its mouth, close its mouth on peace while alive. To be alive is just this pouring in and out. Find, lose, demand, obsess, move head slightly closer. Try to swim without thinking how strong it looks. Try to do what you do without mockery of our heartbroken little era. To mock is easy. She feels a breeze on her forehead, night wind. The fox is stroking splashlessly forward. The fox does not fail.”