Pondlife is a book made of journal entries that Al Alvarez wrote between 2002 and 2011, a period of time covering much of his seventies and reaching into his eighties. It’s about swimming (which Alvarez was doing year-round, outdoors, mostly in the ponds at Hampstead Heath) and also about aging (increasingly so as the book goes on, not surprisingly) and there is also a lot of lovely observation and description of the natural world in it: birds and trees and blossom and weather, wind and sun and rain and the ever-changing sky.
This book is often repetitive, but not in a bad way, just in the way that parts of life and thought are repetitive: daily routines, phrases and habits and feelings that return. Alvarez returns to the adrenalin rush of swimming in cold water, and to how swimming seems to dissolve aches and pains and frustrations, and to his favorite things about certain seasons. I love this, from a day in April 2002 when the water temperature (which Alvarez notes at the start of most entries) was 52 degrees Fahrenheit: “The wind makes small, quick waves, and the sunlight makes them shine. Everything is on the move and dazzling. It’s like diving into champagne” (6). And this, from May 2003: “The streets shine with overnight rain, the sun comes and goes, the air is chilly. Everything is in bloom, the hawthorns look like birthday cakes, though the damp air muffles their scent, pale leaves on every tree, the sweet smell of cut grass (127). And this, about the Mixed Pond at Hampstead Heath: “layer upon layer of trees bending over the pond, and every modulation of green, from dark to silvery grey, all moving in the wind” (128). It is perhaps telling that I’d rather focus on these bits of beauty than on the parts of the book where Alvarez writes of being “trapped in and by [a] foolish, failing wreck of a body” (270). But those parts are there, too, and are as much part of the story as the spring and the light are.
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