#roger deakin
“I went to Wales because the place is stiff with magic, because the Rhinog Mountains are something like a wilderness where I would be free to wander like pipesmoke in a billiard room, and with the kind of apparently random purpose with which the laughing water dashes through the heather, rocks and peat. I went there to be a long way from all the powerful stimuli Wordsworth said prevented us, these days, from doing any proper thinking. My only purpose was to get thoroughly lost; to disappear into the hills and tarns and miss my way home for as long as possible. If I could find a string of swims and dips, each one surpassing the last in aimlessness, so much the better. The great thing about an aimless swim is that everything about it is concentrated in the here and now; none of its essence or intensity can escape into the past or future. The swimmer is content to be borne on his way full of mysteries, doubts and uncertainties. He is a leaf on the stream, free at last from his petty little purposes in life.”
