According to Zadie Smith’s definition, is swimming a joy or pleasure? And what about learning to swim differently?
In the New York Review of Books last year novelist Zadie Smith wrote an article on the differences between joy and pleasure. I wasn’t made aware of the piece until last Christmas, those long, slow, sometimes empty, sometimes bumpy days of eating and reading and sleeping. I read Smith’s words closely; I read them repeatedly. Are these ideas of joy and pleasure really that hard to get a grip on?
What else to do when something’s on your mind than head to the local pool.
In my lane, which luck would have it I didn’t need to share, amongst the crystal-clear chlorinated water, beneath the hazy but grand Southern Tablelands sky, I thought about Zadie Smith and her joy/pleasure conundrum. She believed that for most people joy is just a more intense version of pleasure. However, she also noted, ‘The thing no one ever really tells you about joy is that there is very little pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how could we live?’ It’s this question that hounded – haunted? – me as I got myself from one end of the pool to the other.
I’m a life-long lap-swimmer; I come from the breed of people who find this sort of thing enjoyable. I can remember my first swimming less as a little boy, which was given in the family pool at home in Sydney by a Jaguar-driving man who prevented me from sinking by gripping the back of my tiny black Speedos. Since then there’s rarely been a time when swimming hasn’t been a weekly activity; not so long ago I could do thirty laps, sometimes fifty, every so often more.
Which is probably why my shoulder gave up the ghost. The physiotherapist told me that if I wanted to swim for the rest of my life then I’d have to learn to breathe ‘on both sides’, which, like jogging, is something I’ve simply never been able to do. So, during the Christmas just gone, with Zadie Smith in my head, I began teaching myself to breathe on my left as well as my right. By the end of the first session I could do it, gingerly, and I had to concentrate, but I made it work.
As I walked home I thought, swimming might be a pleasure but teaching this old dog to learn new swimming-pool tricks is where joy lives.
(First published in Panorama, The Canberra Times, 2 February 2013.)
Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote 
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February 8, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Gabrielle Bryden
As the Divinyls noted ‘It’s a fine, fine line between pleasure and pain’. Thanks for the link to Zadie’s article – I often think about those issues – maybe using different words (is it joy, ecstasy, transcendence – who knows) – there is no joy without pain and a world of complete joy would know no joy, as we would not recognise it without the comparison of emotions. I think true joy, as Zadie describes, takes a person to another level and once there you can never truly go back to the previous level because you have ‘seen the light’ so to speak – haha. ps. I am a one sided swimmer too (I need correcting).
February 9, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Nigel Featherstone
The Divinyls forgot to mention that there’s an even finer line between pleasure and joy! But I do like your definition of joy: that it takes us to a different level and it’s difficult to go back. Perhaps that’s what Smith means when she said that there isn’t much pleasure in raising a child, but there certainly is joy? Bringing swimming back into it, perhaps that’s why I felt joyful when I walked away from the pool after teaching myself to ‘breathe on both sides’ – because it had taken me to a different level in my swimming practice? Funny how when you think about it, everything comes back to the body.
February 9, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Feb
whisperinggums
Well that article was a joy to read! Thanks for pointing me … us …. to it Nigel. As I read all sorts of thoughts popped into my head but most have popped out again. I think for me joy is not so much ecstatic but the sudden feeling of quiet well being, a sense that everything is aligned for just a little while in my life and it does feel somewhat transcendental … And I usually can’t explain just why. But I can explain, to my daughter for example, that you can’t have it all the time. It only exists it seems as something different to the rest. It might be difficult to go back, but go back you do … Whether you like it or not … And again that happens out of the blue too. One minute you have it, next minute, whoosh, it’s gone!
February 9, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Nigel Featherstone
Thanks, Sue, for your kind comments. Interesting that you see joy as ‘the sudden feeling of quiet well-being’. I like that. Plus I like that joy is so fleeting, although sometimes I wish it learned to hang around for just a little longer. And I particularly like ‘it only exists, it seems, as something different to the rest’. I’m glad Zadie Smith got us thinking about this stuff!
February 9, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Feb
whisperinggums
That might of course be the older person’s experience of joy! The quietness I mean!
I loved what she wrote about watching faces. I can enjoy a quite average film by just watching the faces. Endlessly fascinating … Real ones and acting ones.
February 11, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Geoff
I’m a swimmer. I can swim for hours. I find it meditative and relaxing. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t enjoy swimming, the water, the feel of bubbles along my body. I also use ‘I’ a lot.
February 12, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Nigel Featherstone
Hi Geoff, so glad that you’re a swimmer too. It really is meditative, isn’t it. As to the ‘I’ – what I find about being in the water is that slowly but surely I think less about the I and more about, well, nothing at all. It’s just bliss.