Playground
I was a pool rat when I was a kid, and each decade since childhood, I’ve faithfully returned to the water — albeit often with yearrrrrs in between. Each reinstallation of the Swimming Routine summons (faux) existential angst about things like buying a new lock, new cap, new goggles; understanding the ins and outs of the location (like the time I was convinced I was “locked out” of the pool but it was just that I was a whole hour early for open swim…cue me banging on the door like a lunatic until I just decided to sit in the sauna 🫠🥵), wondering if muscle memory will take over. (It always does.) Each time, it’s as if it’s a whole new activity I’m trying that I need to gear myself up for. That is, until I hit the water and make my first strokes. My gosh, I love being underwater so, so much. Even when I started hating swim team in my early teens (when one must start hating — and if you were like me, quitting — almost everything), I relished that feeling of being submerged. Time stands still (like, seriously, the 30 mins I swim just whooshes by), you have no idea who is in the lane next to you, and whatever you *can* actually hear recedes each time you put your head back underwater. A sterile pool isn’t the ocean, but there is something magical about water regardless. To me, it’s pure joy.
Playground is the third Richard Powers novel I’ve read, and I’m 3/3 on the awe-struck-o-meter. (It’s a thing.) While the foil for The Overstory is trees and their canopy and for Bewilderment, it’s the sky, Playground is about the ocean and marine life. It’s his #waterbook, I guess. But this is Richard Powers, so it’s also about technology (in this case, AI specifically), love, parenthood, and “the boundary between creation and destruction” (which can be applied to all of the aforementioned, but certainly — and obviously — water and land).
Powers’ ability to parse the 21st century without resorting to beep-boop dystopian shlock is unparalleled. “Play was evolution’s way of building brains, and any creature with a brain as developed as a giant oceanic manta sure used it. If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play. No one denied the play of mammals.”
Pure joy.
originally published on instagram