Buoyancy

Willard Spiegelman has an appealing essay on swimming in the American Scholar (link courtesy of Dave Lull). Here's a pair of sentences I especially liked, following Spiegelman's description of taking up swimming as a graduate student at Harvard:

One day I noticed that I was swimming between Erik Erikson and John Kenneth Galbraith. The former performed an elegant breaststroke, never putting his leonine head of silver locks into the water; the latter, what seemed like all eight feet of him, simply pushed off from one end and arrived at the other almost immediately, effortlessly.