Listening to Lord Jim on audio CD on my way home from Baltimore last night, I noticed a passage about swimming that’s worth making a note of for the thalassologically inclined.  The speaker is Marlow’s friend Stein, a German butterfly-collector & Indonesian traveler whose past includes marriage into a family of local nobility on Celebes (Sulawesi), the deaths of his best friend, wife, and daughter, and then a second life as an wandering ent0mologist.   It’s Stein who places Jim in Patusan.

The excerpt comes from the end of  Chapter 20.

Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is.  A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.  If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns — nicht wah? …No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.  So if you ask me — how to be?

Again, a little bit later

And yet it is true — it is true.  In the destructive element immerse.

The chapter ends with a turn away from this (German, idealist, philosophical) fantasy

Sleep well.  And to-morrow we must do something practical — practical…

Stein, however, doesn’t head toward bed at this point, but instead returns “back to his butterflies,” his own obsession.

On my way down to the Maritime Heritage Conference in Baltimore this week, I stopped by my old Atlantic haunts in Bay Head, NJ.  My parents bought a house across the street from the beach there around 1980, & that short stretch of beach, with the pilings you see in the picture, were my home waters through high school, college, grad school, & beyond, until they sold the house about five years ago to move to FL.

It’s probably over-sentimental to think I was swimming with ghosts, but there’s a lot of personal history ground into that sand. Plus September is the best swimming month on the Atlantic seaboard.

On Wed morning, little jelly fragments were thick in the water — not stingers, but marble-sized chunks of jellyfish-body, scattered in the water and swirling about.  A couple of moon jellies, too, but mostly just bits.  You can swim through them pretty easily, pushing your way through the cloud with an extra tactile sense of the ocean as a home for living, strange, inhuman bodies.

Jellyfish are the ocean’s future, scientists tell us.  They are the species that will do best in the ocean that’s coming: oxygen-deprived, warm, depleted of fish.  It’s a gruesome thought, a violation of our long shared history of ocean aesthetics.  But swimming through the jelly-cloud early Wed morning, with a solitary older fisherman just up the beach on a cloudless day, it seemed as if swimmers & jellies could manage.  The feel of them between my fingers was foreign, slimy, a little disturbing — but also something I could get used to.