The New Yorker:

Productivity culture encourages us to live inside our tasks and projects. But nature offers its own organizational system.

By Joshua Rothman

This summer, I reread the novel “Aurora,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, a science-fiction writer whom I profiled a few years ago. Robinson has an ecological orientation, and “Aurora” is basically a book about how we fit into nature. It ends on a beach, with an extended description of swimming in big waves. It’s early morning, and the waves, as they rise, “turn a deep translucent green.” Freya, the novel’s protagonist, has never swum in the ocean, and over the course of the morning she learns how. She discovers that she can dive under a swell, “feel the tug of the wave’s underturn,” and shoot up when it has passed; that she can swim fast up waves that are about to break, then “crash through their crests and fall down their backsides”; and that she can surf, “sliding sideways ahead of the break and across the surface of the wave, which keeps rising up before her, steepening at just the right speed to keep her falling down across it.” This is amazing, like flying, but it can also go wrong: when waves crash down on her before she’s ready, she gets tumbled along the bottom, hitting the sand. Once, she almost drowns.

Freya swims under, over, and along the waves, one after another. Each wave is its own event, difficult or ideal, but collectively they chain together in a soothing rhythm. Sometimes she has to rush to handle a fast set of waves, but such moments are rare; most of the time, she can navigate the wave in front of her, and then turn to the next. This rhythm is part of what makes the beach a special place. It’s a little miraculous that something as powerful as the sea can be, in some sense, predictable.

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