Atlantic High by William F. Buckley Jr. Read Free Book Online Page B

is permitted to be wrenchingly funny, or wry. But the impulse to smile, as one would at a spectacular sunset, or burst of wildlife, or during an aria splendidly executed, requires concentration to overcome, particularly when there are comic encounters, as when your rump backs into something and you wheel about convinced you have backed into a shark. Nothing is less sharklike than Bindy (Viscountess Lambton), whose rump it was, though probably she is bigger than any shark, like Kirsten Flagstad. She is the original earth mother, with a whimsical rolling laugh that chokes off the words that are constantly amusing her and, through her, you. On Sunday she accompanied me to Mass at Suva because, she said, although not a Catholic she thought it would be good to pray for the new pope designated as such the previous day. I told her that was a very nice thing to do, that I had to confess the unlikelihood that I would go to Mass specially to pray for the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and she said I most certainly should, since the poor man has few enough people praying for him these sad, schismatic days.
    The beautiful Bindy requires the coordination of two men to hoist her on board the dinghy, but whole armies would disengage for the pleasure of serving Bindy, who only yesterday could have posed for the most convincing statue of Brünnehilde ever struck. She saw that I was cold and, after the first day, gave me her spare wet suit, greatly increasing my comfort. And, as soon as we got back on board, she would make up for all the laughter we missed during the two half-hour dives Vane permitted us every day (more than one hour out of twenty-four in the deep does something, once again, to the nitrogen content of your blood, which needs rebuilding). It was Bindy who said to me innocently, a book on her lap during the cocktail hour, “What is an irresponsible flake?”
    “A
what
, Bindy?”
    “An
‘irresponsible flake.’
That’s what it says here.” She showed me page 146 of
Safe Scuba
, under the heading “Selecting a Buddy.”
    I was introduced to what is the most hilariously periphrastic English in print. The co-authors must, between them, have attended at least five teachers’ colleges to achieve their prose style. “Most often, we have little choice with regard to the selection of a buddy,” you read on, “in many cases we may be married to our buddy, or involved in a similar relationship to marriage, or we may be assigned a buddy by a divemaster on a boat, if possible, regardless of how our buddies are selected it is an extremely good idea to know the person with whom you are going to dive. You should know your buddy’s character patterns and diving skills. If your buddy is an irresponsible flake on the surface, the chances are excellent that the same idiotic behavior patterns will continue underwater.”
    I told Bindy that honest injun, most people in America don’t talk that way, and took the book from her. There are acres and acres of the same kind of thing. The authors’ intention, clearly, is to persuade anyone who wants to scuba dive that he (or as
they
would put it: “he or she, as the case may be”) should spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars in instructions. My very favorite passage deals with the rather simple question: Can you swim? “…failure of a swimming test may not demonstrate the student to be in poor physical condition, but only that the student lacks effective swimming skills. The swimming does not necessarily demonstrate that the diver will function well in the sub-aquatic environment. Mental conditioning, cognitive and affective, and proper habit patterns may be far more relevant to learning diving skills and surviving in the open water than physical conditioningas the prime criteria in dive student selection.” All that and one mashed potato will get you two mashed potatoes. But I had already resolved never ever to do anything, in the sub-aquatic environment
or
in the super-aquatic