Oliver Sacks, neurologist and writer, died Sunday at age 82. I did not know Dr. Sacks but had the privilege of swimming in an adjacent lane many mornings several years ago in Chelsea.
Tonight I read for the first time an essay he wrote about swimming that was published in The New Yorker, May 26, 1997. In it, Dr. Sacks recalls how he learned to swim by imitating his father’s strokes. Another parallel: My father swims still, at age 84.
Here’s how the essay concludes:
“There is an essential rightness about swimming, as about all such flowing and, so to speak, musical activities. And then there is the wonder of buoyancy, of being suspended in this thick, transparent medium that supports and embraces us. One can move in water, play with it, in a way that has no analogue in the air. One can explore its dynamics, its flow, this way and that; one can move one’s hands like propellers or direct them like little rudders; one can become a little hydroplane or submarine, investigating the physics of flow with one’s own body.
And beyond this, there is all the symbolism of swimming—it’s imaginative resonances, its mythic potentials.
My father called swimming ‘the elixir of life,’ and certainly it seemed to be so for him: he swam daily, slowing down only slightly with time, until the grand age of ninety-four. I hope I can follow him, and swim till I die.”