In the beach bag, carefully wrapped so they don't get wet, we carry Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Jane Austen's Sense and sensibility. I'm reading the first, but when I finish it I'll also read the second, because there are few things more encouraging than someone else telling you about the book they're immersed in, reflecting aloud on what awakens them, or reading bits to you.
Perhaps it is because summer is ending, but these two novels unintentionally make me think of the sea. And in the gesture of bathing. It always amazes me how quickly people forget the past, or how often we believe that our way of living, thinking or doing things is universal, obvious and timeless. Swimming in the sea, for example.
Treasure Island reminds me of the phrase "just barely saved", which supposedly was coined around 1809, when Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's little brother who had just occupied the Spanish throne, issued a law that forced sailors to cut themselves. hair. The protests did not wait because the long hair had its reasons; it made it easier to spot a man fallen into the sea and increased the chances of grabbing a handful of his hair and pulling him out of the water to save his life, because in the old days, despite spending half a lifetime at sea, most sailors (and pirates ) did not know how to swim.
Sense and sensitivity makes me think of bathroom machines. A bathing machine was a small cart, with a wooden roof and wall or curtains that either a horse or an individual would drag into the water so that the bathers of Austen's time (particularly bathers, because men they enjoyed more freedom) could change their clothes and dive into the sea as the etiquette dictated; without being seen. Some English beaches even offered the services of a dipper, a person of the same sex as the bather who dipped you in and out of the sea.
In the absence of a horse, cart, and curtains, we uninhibitedly undressed and swam out to sea. Then we have played drowning and save ourselves by the hair. In other words, to get us out of the water by grabbing us by the hair, which, as a beach game, I would recommend with a 1 out of 10.
