ENJOY THE GAME

NEVER PANIC, ALWAYS COME BACK: ON THE SOLITUDE OF FREEDIVING

LUCIAN THALOR 

May 15, 2025

Beneath the surface, silence thickens. In this meditation on freediving and solitude, Lucian Thalor slips past the edge of language and light—descending not for records, but for the stillness that awaits when you’re released from the world above.

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I came to Nice for the weather, yes. For the sea, certainly, and for the way the city holds itself with an elegance both faded and defiant. For the opportunity to dress up for dinner without anyone thinking it old-fashioned. Life here moves in long, elliptical arcs. It has the texture of old silk, worn but fragrant. People still pause before speaking. Someone might glance at the sky and call it lilac. I didn’t come to begin again, nor to be healed. I came because all the other places I might have chosen felt too final—or, worse, familiar. This one at least promised a kind of anonymity that did not insist on explanation.

I was living in Cimiez, high above town, in a part of Nice where time, like everything else, seems to move more slowly. There are no tourists here, just grand villas with cracked tiles and carved balustrades, and streets that curve like sentences. Once the preferred retreat of Queen Victoria and the wintering elite, Cimiez still bears the impression of old monarchical hands. The ruins of a Roman amphitheater, olive groves, the rustle of lavender in the monastery gardens—every corner carries the weight of other lives. Henri Matisse lived and died here. That makes sense. I was renting a two-story villa built in 1913—a house with an endless array of rooms, full of mirrors and shadows. Every detail was original, not restored but preserved. The house had been kept alive, tended with care, and held in beauty, as if love itself had been doing the housekeeping. The floors creaked with certainty. The balcony was larger than the kitchen, and the garden insisted on growing wild. Through a gap in the palm trees, the sea flashed like a secret. The staircase spiraled like an afterthought. 

Enzo the great

Before I arrived, I had rewatched Le Grand Bleu (1988), a film I once thought I understood. I had seen it young, and, like most young people, I had taken it at face value—a tale of competition, of two men trying to outdo each other underwater. But watching it again, something shifted. It felt less like a film and more like a mood. A long, slow exhale. A study in disappearance. Two men sinking for reasons they could not articulate. One of them does not return.

One morning, I drove down to Villefranche-sur-Mer, a place that never quite announces itself, folded into the coastline like a handkerchief forgotten in a pocket. Here, where the Alps descend into the Mediterranean, the water becomes deep before you’ve had time to understand how far from shore you are. It was there I saw the sign: Plongée libre. I parked. I stared. Something in me stirred—something absurd and boyish. Enzo. The swagger. The romance of descent. 

Villefranche-sur-Mer, with Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in the distance

Freediving: no tanks, no apparatus, no noise. Just breath. You descend on a single inhalation, and trust that your body will remember the way back. The world record for constant weight with fins is 130 meters. But the origins of the sport lie not in records, but in necessity and ritual.

For more than two thousand years, the Ama of Japan—women mostly—have been descending into the sea for pearls and seaweed. The Haenyeo of Korea do the same, holding their breath for minutes at a time, their rhythm as old as the tide. In Greece, the sponge divers of Kalymnos dropped with stones tied to their feet, surfacing when the world began to spin. Aristotle wrote of divers who carried sponges in their mouths to avoid swallowing seawater. Pliny the Elder described men pouring oil across the surface to still the water, to see farther into the blue.

Ama endure the ages: Two pearl divers wade in the surf, carrying their nets

The modern form of the sport emerged in the mid-twentieth century. Raimondo Bucher, an Italian air force pilot, dove beyond what was thought possible. Bob Croft trained in Navy hyperbaric chambers, learning how long the body could function without air.

Then came Mayol and Maiorca. Jacques Mayol believed in a future buried in our past. Meditation, long hours of stillness. He spoke of our aquatic potential as if it were a memory. Enzo Maiorca believed in force. In thunder. In conquest. They broke each other’s records like rivals breaking hearts. It wasn’t about numbers. It was about myth.

I signed up for a course without much thought. I expected rules. Wet suits. Technique. I didn’t expect the silence. The pressure. The sense that the sea was not something you moved through, but something that moved through you.

By the second day, I stopped thinking of it as a sport. 

Divers around a buoy, ready to descend

At twelve meters, the body becomes neutrally buoyant—neither rising nor sinking. Suspended. For a moment, time thins. You feel neither forward nor backward. You feel erased. The mammalian dive reflex takes over. Your pulse slows. Blood retreats to the heart and brain. Muscles shift to anaerobic modes. It is ancient and involuntary, a conversation between your lungs and a part of you you’ve forgotten how to name. Carbon dioxide builds before the oxygen runs out. It is not the lack of oxygen that makes you want to breathe—it is fear. The trick is learning to wait. To listen without responding. To surrender without drama. To get over that hump.

I began to rise before dawn. My movements became monastic. Weight belt. Breath up. Duck dive. Down. The rope was not a guide, just reassurance. At ten meters, the pressure closed in. At twelve, I let go.

Always come back—no matter how beautiful the dark

I didn’t want to compete. I didn’t want to be watched. I didn’t want to win. I just wanted to vanish, just for a moment, into a blue so complete it had no edge.

And then came the solitude. Not loneliness. Not exile. Something quieter. Complete privacy. A depth no one else could touch. No demands. No names. No clocks. Just the sound of my own heartbeat, muffled by pressure. I began to crave it. The dark became velvet. The light above, a myth. At twenty meters, the blue turns to ink. And still, I wanted to go further.

Our instructor said little. He was from Marseille. Gaunt and wind-carved. He told us only two things: Never panic. Always come back. Everything else is nuance.

But the man who really taught me came later. Retired. Sea-wrecked. Corsican. Everyone just called him Matteu. He had the sun-beaten look of someone who had trained in silence for a dozen decades. He wore a faded T-shirt: Nice Freediving Cup ’87. He agreed to teach me because I didn’t ask.

Matteu

“You want to go deep?” he said. “Then stop thinking of it as down. It’s not down. It’s in.”

He taught me how to pack my lungs with air. How to hold the diaphragm instead of the throat. How to become invisible to the sea.

He told obscure stories—of Natalia Molchanova, who slipped away during a dive near Ibiza and never returned. Of divers in Dahab and Kalamata. Of blackouts that came like lullabies. “The good ones,” he said, “don’t fight. They fall asleep.”

He said I was careful. What he meant was: quiet. I knew how to disappear without announcing it. We did not speak much. His accented French was hard to understand, but we could communicate without too many words.

Sometimes I felt the pull—not metaphorical, but physical. Something behind the rib cage. Not toward the surface, but away from it.

The sea in front of Villefranche falls away like a secret. A few strokes from shore and the bottom vanishes. That never frightened me; it calmed me, like a hand on the back.They call it the Canyon of Villefranche, and it descends a thousand meters straight down, though after twenty, there is only darkness. Only depth. Only the abyss. 

Le Grand Bleu

There are many kinds of descent. Not all of them involve water.

I began to dream of sinking. Past streets. Past voices. Past light. I surfaced once and forgot what day it was.

I read about shallow-water blackout. The science. The stories. The divers who did not return. I obeyed every rule, but sometimes I imagined staying down. Not dying. Just staying.

One morning, I went deeper than planned. I lost the rope, then found it again just as the world began to vignette. I surfaced. The sky was too bright. Matteu didn’t speak. Neither did I. We both knew.

I was organized. Disciplined. Drawn to the part of myself who lived twenty meters below. The one that didn’t need to speak. The one that understood that pressure, when welcomed, is another form of peace. 

Forgetting the world above with every silent stroke

Freediving, I realized, is never about breath. It is about permission. Permission to vanish just enough to remember what you are. At depth, the body begins to unlearn the surface. Vision narrows. Sound dissolves. You slip into a manageable kind of dying—and yet, in that narrowing, you feel more alive than ever. Now, writing this, I feel the withdrawal—from the depths, from the darkness, from the water, from the silence, and, most of all, from the solitude.

Lucian Thalor (b. 1971 in St. Helena) has lived in Trieste, Porto, Elba, and for a time in the South Pacific on a boat with no name. He writes rarely and publishes less. He once worked as a docent at a maritime museum in Gibraltar, but couldn’t recall what most of the objects were called. He said he preferred the unnamed ones, the ones that had been claimed by the sea.

Cover image: The author, on his way up