“Waterlog” is subtly political. Deakin was intent on challenging the privatization of once public waters. “The right to walk freely along river banks or to bathe in rivers, should no more be bought and sold than the right to walk up mountains or to swim in the sea from our beaches,” he writes. In one rousing passage, he yells back at censorious river keepers who chastise him for swimming in the trout-filled Itchen, which runs through the grounds of an élite boarding school: “I already felt invigorated after a really first class swim, and now I felt even better after a terrific set-to.” For Deakin, swimming in open waters is a subversive act—a way to reclaim nature cordoned off by capitalism, and to “regain a sense of what is old and wild in these islands.”
Deakin died, from a brain tumor, in 2006. A year later, Walnut Tree Farm was bought by a couple, Jasmin and Titus Rowlandson, who have maintained his commitment to ungentrified country living. There is still no central heating in the farmhouse; it is warmed by an Aga stove and an enormous open hearth, over which dinner is typically cooked. Last year, Titus, who restores classic automobiles in the barn, and Jasmin, a jeweller and a painter, began offering overnight stays in two renovated cabins on the property. In early November, I took the train from London to Suffolk, with the aim of swimming in Deakin’s moat. Heavy rain had fallen all morning, sluicing the windows of the train as it rolled through the port of Ipswich. Deakin’s book begins with an ecstatic moat swim in summer rain, amid “water sprites springing up on tiptoe like bright pins over the surface.” A chilly, wet autumn day seemed considerably less enchanting.
Humans were supposed to be “the rational animal”! Are we instead just doomed to keep making lots of terrible decisions?
New research says there’s another way to look at it. What if people often choose to be irrational in cases where doing the rational thing would violate something they value more — like socially conscious behavior? And if that’s the case, should we actually embrace some instances of irrationality rather than discounting it as an embarrassing nuisance?
An otherwise straightforward writing style becomes abrupt, slippery; the anxiety and disorientation readers feel largely mimics the experience of trauma or grief — life is largely happening to you without your consent or agency, and you’re left running to keep up. It’s a unique reading experience, but one I’ve had in various forms last fall with three different Nordic novels in translation.
The title is appropriate. Clarke is writing about dying, but also, eloquently, about living. Saul Bellow wrote that death is “the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything”: it gives life its value and time its precious meaning. In Clarke’s hospice, on good days, she sees her patients living as they approach their ends, freshly aware of life’s everyday loveliness. And the passages in her book that made me want to weep were not the ones about dying, but the ones about living, loving, learning how to say goodbye.