My Kingdom for a Bath

I am a bather. I remember a children's book we had called Five Minutes' Peace, which told the harrowing tale of a mama elephant who went to all kinds of trouble to get her children away from her long enough so she could bathe. I remember this book because it was my first self-aware moment that children are terrible and that it made the bathtub, which I had heretofore resisted, seem like a place of serenity and refinement. The elephant in the book dons a bathing cap and enjoys a cup of tea briefly before her brood comes in and ruins everything, an apt metaphor for life, but the happiness on her face (for only one page, mind you), stuck with me. I wanted that.

Perhaps it was easy to see myself as that pacific bathing pachyderm. Elephants and humans are, after all, the only animals that have chins. If Five Minutes' Peace were about a bathing ape, I might not have connected with it (and it certainly would have been more expensive). Perhaps its hereditary, as my father is a bather. Perhaps I'm trying to emulate greatness. Oprah enjoys a good soak. St. Brigid of Ireland was canonized in part for performing the miracle of transforming her used bathwater into beer which says more about the purity of 6th century water (and the tastiness of 6th century beer) than anything else. French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat loved bathing so much, it's where his assassins knew to find him. It is unusual that Marat was bathing in his home in the 18th century as personal baths are a very recent phenomenon. In 1915, a survey of an area of London found only 12 homes with bathtubs, and nine of them were being used for storage. If I didn't have a bathtub, I don't know what I'd do but I know I'd read a lot less. 

What it is about water and reading that seem to go so nicely together? We have the term "beach read" and we don't have the term "park read" or "gym read." The phrase "beach read" was first used around 1990, which coincidently is near the time we stopped being a serious species. I clearly recognize the appeal of reading while wet, but why must that reading be simple, unchallenging or inane? Where does that come from? Every summer, someone will waddle over to me at the pool and ask me what I'm reading, if the book is presumed to be heady, the person will recoil and say "Whoa, isn't that a little heavy for the pool?" Reader, it gets harder every year to refrain from saying "Aren't you a little heavy for the pool?" I appreciate a schlocky thriller or romance as much as anyone, and I really don't care what anyone reads anywhere, but I don't see why certain intellectual stimulates are only allowed in certain areas. When Elizabeth Bennet is reading outdoors on the Hertfordshire estate, it's not like Mr. Darcy goes "Hey—there's a pond over there, why don't I replace that wordy thing with Pecs of Passion for you?" 

People who are critical of bathing say it's unsanitary. "You're sitting in your own filth," they say with a sneer that reeks of projection. Not so. Unless you are returning from a Tough Mudder and are covered in dirt, baths are just as clean as showers. Besides, there is no evidence that COVID-19 can spread through bathwater—or pool water for those who are still clinging to hope of some kind of summer. "Baths are wasteful," they say with the squinty eyes of those who live to deny others joy. Untrue. It takes 36 gallons to fill up a standard tub. Most showers use 5 gallons every minute. The average American spends 8.2 minutes in the shower, so do the math. I save even more water in mine by not filling it with tap water but with the tears of those who hate baths, which is renewable, clean and very sweet.  

Besides, the amount of water on earth is constant, it's just continually recycled over time. The posh $5 bottle of water you're enjoying has probably been through the renal system of a dinosaur and there's no amount of filtering that will make that untrue. I asked my brother, who is a scientist, why we can't make new water by creating hydrogen and oxygen and combining the two. It turns out we can but it requires so much energy it is a sunk cost, which is a good metaphor for spending $5 on something that comes out of the tap for free.

As many of you noted, most of the earth's surface is covered with water but water is a tiny part of the planet's actual mass (less than a fiftieth of one percent, in fact). If your kid comes home from science class (whenever science class becomes something your kid goes to again) and tells you that the Earth is 70% water, explain to him that the lower mantle, the massive semimolten layer 400 miles beneath the surface that makes up much of the mass of the world has hardly any water. Then hope that he doesn't call child protective services. You should believe your children when they tell you water is blue. Water is not clear or transparent, it is a faint shade of blue. If you filled a huge white pool with water and looked straight down through it, it would be blue.

Unless you were in ancient Greece, where Homer says the water was the color of wine. He also says the sky was the color of bronze. There are many guesses as to why this might be. The first is that the water was indeed wine-colored and the sky was in fact bronze 3000 years ago, which is almost certainly not true. Perhaps ancient Greeks had not evolved to the point where their retinas could perceive color, which explains why there are very few words for colors in ancient Greek, which has no word for blue at all, for example, but 3000 years is not very long in evolutionary terms. A blink of an eye, really, and our eyes are probably exactly the same as theirs. When Homer says the sky is bronze, he means that it is bright and dazzyling. When he refers to the "wine-dark sea," most scholars agree that he's referring to condition of the water, not its color. There are many languages that treat color as a symptom of brightness, not a wheel that can be split up into different shades. There are more languages in Papau New Guinea than anywhere else in the world and most of them have no words for the colors, only distinguishing between light and dark. When languages develop words for color they all do so in the same order. White and black are first, red is always the third color, green and yellow always follow and the sixth is always blue. 

Being an ancient Greek, Plato may not have had a word for blue but he had plenty of other words, of course. In The Phaedo, Plato relates the last hours of Socrates, who was sentenced to death for heresy (almost all quotes attributed to Socrates should be attributed to his pupil Plato, who wrote dialogues of his teacher constantly. Absolutely nothing Socrates wrote himself survives). Socrates is discussing the immortality of the soul and importance of passionate debate when his captors come to collect him for his execution by hemlock. He has only one request, after having finished the work of passing knowledge on to others: to have a bath. 

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